[tonyarkles]

This works fantastic for building furniture as well, where the absolute dimension doesn’t matter as much as all of the pieces having matching dimensions. A cabinet with drawers, for example. The story stick captures the spacing between the drawers, the width of the drawer, the slightly smaller height of the drawer face, etc.

It feels really imprecise the first time you set the fence on a table saw based on a marking on a stick instead of a precise specific value but the results are hard to argue with.

[saalweachter]

With carpentry in particular, it is extremely powerful to make multiple cuts at the same time -- set a fence once and then cut everything that needs to match at the same time, or stack multiple pieces together, or cut a board to length before ripping it into several pieces that need identical lengths.

Sure, check your measurements to be sure they're correct, but the more times you can cut based on the same measurement, the less measurement error can creep in.

[tonyarkles]

Was going to mention that too. 100% agree. If I mess up and end up needing to make matching cuts later on, I'll often set the fence using one of the existing pieces too instead of trying to re-measure. The story stick works great but lining up the teeth on the blade with the cut edge of an existing piece works fabulously well.

A similar strategy I've used when I've known that there was going to be cuts that I couldn't sequence like that is to cut "as built" story sticks with scrap dimensional lumber and write what they are right on the board.