74 - Mini Cross Cut Sled & Jobsite Saw Sled

[Music] hi everyone my name is James welcome to King's fine woodworking today I am building what I would normally call a small parts sled this is basically a miniature crosscut sled and this will allow me to cut small parts safely and it's a lot more convenient to pull this out than it is to get my full-size crosscut sled out it's also super easy to make there's probably only about an hour's worth of work in it and it can be done mostly out of scraps since this sled is just going to accompany my main sled I don't really want to spend a lot of money on this one so we're gonna make this one just about entirely out of spare parts which means I'm not gonna buy mitre bars for it I'm gonna cut mine out of a hardwood I do happen to have Purple Heart but that's because I have a lot of exotics here if you don't have Purple Heart that's fine you can use oak you can use maple you can use any hardwood that you have the first thing I do is try to set my saw as close to three-quarter inch as possible but maybe slightly over this allows me to dial down to the exact fit and you can see it's a little bit big and then I've adjusted it about a hairline over probably not even the thickness of a piece of paper and we'll make one more cut and see how this fits so after this cut I'm hoping that it fits in but I don't mind if it's super tight because I can always sand it down to a perfect fit and that's what I'm looking for it fits in there very tight but I can't really slide it forward and backwards so I'll take it over to my sander and I'll just sand off a little bit on both sides and I'll go back and forth and test the fit until it fits snugly within that miter slot yeah is that pink band-aid distracting to anybody else it sure is to me while I'm editing this here okay anyway that's pretty good fit now I'm gonna just turn this thing sideways and I will slice off a couple of the mitre bars I know that the depth of my slot is 3/8 of an inch so I'll just take this a hair under 3/8 of an inch for the width and that'll be fine yep band-aids still bugging me okay that looks like a pretty good fit so I'll cut the other one we'll set these aside and they'll be ready to go one thing I guess I do want to do is I want to sand off the burn marks on the top and bottom just because I think they're ugly and I do want to sand the corners if you have a hardwood and you've cut it to real sharp corners you don't want to end up cutting yourself they end up pretty sharp so I typically sand those off to eliminate splinters that's not going to affect the fit of that miter bar at all for the next step I'm actually going to cut the bed the bottom part of the sled sometimes my miter saw is not quite long enough to make the cut so I'll just have to lift up on the end of the board to finish the cut there so this is half-inch Baltic birch that I'm using and you could use any half inch plywood it doesn't have to be Baltic birch I'm just gonna square off the other end of it there it's kind of ragged because it was a piece of wood that's been sitting in the corner of my shop now I have a piece of 3/4 inch plywood and I'm gonna cut four strips and this is going to be basically making the front and back fence or what I like to call the closed fence and the far fence for the crosscut sled and many use two pieces each I like the fences to be fairly thick that really makes for a good stout strong sled and that allows me to get all the way down to half-inch thick for the base of the sled so now I'm going to glue these up together on my table saw that's going to keep them very flat first thing is to get this little end cap out of the way I'm not sure what that's for this allows you to use the glue at the proper flow setting and obviously I do like to get full coverage but I want to make sure that it's an even coverage so if you use one of these glue spreaders they've got grooves in them and this more or less ends up allowing you to put just the exact right amount of glue that you need to keep a uniform even coat on and then we're going to go ahead and glue these things together and remember both the close fence and the far fence on the sled are built with double thick plywood so there's takes a pair of these to make each fence and if you happen to have a table saw or an extremely flat surface to glue this on it really helps out because then your fence ends up dead flat by the time it's all dry and that's a really important thing to have for any crosscut sled you don't want your fence warped or twisted at all after I clamp it up I do want to wipe the excess glue off and it's real important to use some sort of paper down below because that glue will rust your table saw if you don't and this I did leave clamped up overnight you could clamp it for just a few hours if needed but we didn't have anything else to do so the next day we went ahead and took the clamps off and there we have our two fence pieces and they're both perfectly flat and sews I got to join us in the shop today it was after school and so she want to come out for a few minutes so she helped us do some jointing in the shop and I like to run these boards over the fence boards over the jointer when we're done this sort of takes off the extra glue squeeze-out that we didn't get cleaned off fully and gives us night nice flat square parallel edges to our fence after that it was over to the miter saw so that I could cut the fence to link the first thing I want to do is square off each end which also gets rid of a little bit of this glue squeeze out there and we'll measure it to the length of our our crosscut sled and then we'll cut it off and we'll cut both pieces of events [Music] so with those cut next thing that I would like to do is put a small groove like a sham fir basically on one end of one of the fences this is going to be the closed fence and this little groove is going to allow the sawdust to have a channel to evacuate it out of the way when we're holding our boards back against the fence for cross-cutting and it'll make more sense as I put the crosscut sled together since it was overnight I want to make sure that these haven't warped or changed and they still look good to me so it's time to go ahead with the assembly so if you remember I've cut my miter bars to be just slightly shorter than this miter slot is deep so if I just drop the miter bars in there then I wouldn't be able to really glue these on to my the bed of my sled so I've got to raise them up a little bit so you can use a coin you can use a washer or a couple of washers in my case since they're pretty thin that kind of gets them up just above the surface and that will allow me to to be able to glue them to the bed nicely and so I'm gonna put some cyanoacrylate glue on these this is gonna hold it temporarily it'll kind of freeze it into place so that I can flip it over and get some screws in it and I have a few things going on here at once I'm first gonna kind of site where those bars are so that I can spray a little bit of instant cure onto the sled base that's gonna allow those Det to freeze right away and then I've got my table saw fence set at a predetermined distance and I've got my miter bars coming right to the edge of the table saw and I'm also gonna line up the bed of the sled to the edge of the table saw and equal with the fence this is sort of the alignment method to get everything started out being as square as I can in just a few seconds that will have cured and set and I can go ahead and remove this now I have cut the miter bars long just because I didn't bother measuring them I knew they'd be bigger than what I needed and I'll just trim those off later now what I need to do is to drill some holes in order to set put my screws in place so I'll start with a pilot hole and then I'll go with a countersink because I don't want the heads of the screw to be sticking above the bottom of the miter bar and then we'll go ahead and put the screw in and I did need to make sure the screw gets driven just below the surface and we can take a close look at that here and I can see it's just barely below the surface I don't really want to go any lower nap then I run the risk of the screw poking through the top but that works once we're satisfied with the fit and we prove that it didn't go through the top we'll go ahead and load up the rest of this with screws in case you're curious this is a 3/4 inch by number-6 screw it works perfectly for sled the size and there'll be a link to all the parts that I used for this in the description in fact I'm also going to have a complete set of plans with instructions exactly how to do this in the description as well in case that you're interested and in fact I'm gonna try to do something unique with this set of plans that I've never done before I'm gonna put the sale price of these fans at $2.99 but in the event that you are unable to pay for them or you don't want to pay for them that's cool I'm gonna give everybody a coupon code to get them for free and I'll explain that here in just a moment so real quick I've drawn out a sketch of what I want the far fence to look like and I'm gonna cut that out on the bandsaw and I'll finish explaining about the plans so the cost which is going to be less than 3 bucks is really an optional price if you feel that you've gotten inequality content out of the channel and you'd like to donate anything to the channel to help us out with production costs you can go ahead and buy the plans for $2.99 for this if you are new to the channel or that's not something you're interested in doing or you simply can't pay that's no problem I'm gonna put a coupon code in the description here to allow you to go to the website and enter that and just check out and buy the plans for free and see what you think and you know maybe you'll look at them you'll give them a try and you'll buy other plans from us in the future who knows but I thought I would do this just sort of as a trial thing I'll leave this like that for this particular set of plans forever and it's just free it's entirely up to you if you'd like to donate three bucks to the channel in order to get the plans or not when we do make a little bit of money from ad revenue from YouTube when we put these videos on it's actually surprisingly small amount a lot less than most people might be thinking there it doesn't even come close to covering the cost of the wood or the video production or any of that sort of thing or our time at all but we do it because we have a lot of fun we thought we'd be able to put out a lot more content if people liked it and you know occasionally one of the Bison plans or things like that that helps us out and that's really how you know we I think we'll be able to make the majority of our money and be able to keep this thing going either way it's entirely up to you you can do anything that you like it won't hurt our feelings either way we really like doing this and you know if everybody comes and gets them for free that's no problem we're still gonna put out as much content as we can because like I said we do have a lot of fun doing it okay let me shift focus back to the project care that's what matters so once we have done the cutout and I sanded it a little bit on the belt sander the the oscillating spindle sander that we had and then I'm going to use the corners with a 1/8 inch radius round over bit that'll kind of take off all the sharpness and once that's complete this will complete the Far fence for the sled it didn't necessarily have to be cut down like this but I think it looks nice and it takes off a little bit of extra weight okay so let's head back over to the table saw with this and let's start assembling the fences so for the closed fence the one closest to you take a look at the groove the chamfer that we made there that's going to go right there that's going to be a little duct for the sawdust to get out of your way and then here is the far fence the fence that is farthest from the operator and that's sort of the orientation so now I'm going to flip it up on end and I'm going to go ahead and install the far fence with the table saw acting as a nice flat surface for both the fence and the bed of the sled I'm going to go ahead and clamp them together now we can flip it around and we can screw it together this fence does not have to have any sort of special alignment all its really just there to hold the table saw sled together because the two parts of the base of the sled will be cut apart so once the sled is in operation so the fence is really what maintains the integrity of the entire sled so I'll just run a series of screws along the bottom and I'll make absolutely sure that I'm not going to put a screw in where the table saw blade would pass through I'm just gonna go ahead and trim off the two pieces of miter bar that we're sticking out you could leave them sticking out it doesn't really hurt anything but I kind of wanted a nice neat look this is a Catawba it's a Japanese pull saw it doesn't have a spine at the back at the top part so it allows you to get a perfectly flush cut against something okay let's take a look at where the closed fence is going to go it's going to go right here up front and you can see the channel there the groove the 45 degree chamfer that's going to allow that dust to escape so we can push our parts back against it so for starters I'm gonna go ahead and line this up right back against the edge of the sled I know it's probably not perfect at that point but this is how we're going to start this procedure then I'm going to put one screw in which will be on the far right-hand side and that's it I'm gonna screw this grin very tight to the fence to hold the fence down snugly but just one at this point so keep in mind that the left side of the fence can pivot forward and backward and I've just shown you there that it can do that I'm gonna leave it straight and flush with the edge for the time being but I do have the ability to pivot it now the next step is for me to go ahead and cut my slot partway through the sled I've got to make sure I raise the blade up high enough to accomplish this and we want to cut through the entire base and we vote we only want to cut all the way down to a place fairly close to the closed fence and then stop there we don't want to go through that fence yet because remember that fence is not fixed in place but this gives me an idea of where the path of the blade is so now I can take a very accurate square and I can put the square in place and I can align that with the cut I can align it with the fence and with the cut and make sure that I square them I can pivot the fence forward and backward in order to get that to become square with the slot I've moved it over to the other side so that you can see it and my trick for doing that is I use something like a pencil and I'll slide the point of it up and down and make sure there's no catch I want it to feel as if the metal and the wood are one and I look along the back and I can see my square is tight along the back and then I'll go ahead and I'll clamp it down now this is very very accurate this is probably to within a few thousandths of an inch of accuracy this is not as accurate as the five cut method if you want to use the five cut method you can certainly watch my other video and see how to do that but I never do that for my small parts sleds I've carefully picked it up and I'm gonna go ahead and install one screw and I want to make sure that I haven't moved it adjusted anything so I'm gonna set it back down I'm gonna pull the clamps off and I'm going to check it again same exact method here I'm going to get it aligned exactly with the fence aligned with my groove and I'm going to use a pencil I'm gonna slide it back and forth between the seam make sure there's no bump make sure the the square matches up perfectly with the slot and it did so now I can go ahead flip it over and finish screwing the closed fence in fully once again we want to make sure that we do not have a screw that goes through the path of the blade now I just want to take a minute and sand off all of those little fibers and splinters that have torn up from drilling the holes and putting the screws in it's important that the bottom of that sled stays smooth and next what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a safety block at the back end to make sure that I don't accidentally push the fence too far and have the blade come through and cut my hand so I'm going to use a couple of leftover pieces of the fence the fence ended up being longer than what I needed when I created it so I'll just use a couple of these rather than try to explain this in great detail I'll just kind of let you see how it's coming together for a minute I've cut a sham fur or a 45-degree cut on the end of that thin piece that goes in the middle so that I can sight down inside of that block and you'll see what that's for in a minute too I'm going to cover it with some clear plastic or acrylic so that I can look down inside of there and see where the blade is when it exits the back of the sled most acrylics cut pretty well on the chop saw or the table saw you just need to cut slow so you don't splinter the the plastic and I think that's how that's going to go together so now let's assemble it for this also I'm just going to use sino acrylate glue and most of the time when I use it I like to put the glue on one surface and the accelerator or the instant cure compound on the other surface it's usually an ether or something that allows the the glue to bond instantly so we don't have to wait that whole minute nobody nobody has a minute to waste for this and we'll do the same thing there of course you don't want to get you wanted to align it perfectly but you also don't want to get too much because then it runs down and it's ugly and it takes forever to sand off but I guess sometimes we do that here now I'm just gonna flatten these edges nicely so that it looks good get some of that extra glue sanded off and then we will bond the plastic onto the top CA glue is the perfect choice for this because CA glue not only bonds to wood but it bonds to plastic you could not use wood glue for this plastic wood glue will not adhere to plastic because it's not porous so that's not gonna happen you're gonna have to use a CA glue and epoxy or something like that and CA is really the choice now if I were an expert I would have put just exactly enough CA glue so that when I press to the plastic down on it it made a nice beautiful uniform even layer everywhere and didn't look stripy but yeah I didn't do that so it must not be an expert I have that square in position lined up with the slot to kind of give me an idea of where this is going to be centered and I'm going to put it on a piece of sandpaper to kind of elevate this up off of the surface just a tiny bit I don't necessarily want this blade guard to catch when I'm sliding it back and forth so if I you know raise it up by ten or fifteen thousand so that's gonna work out great I think CA glue is the best choice for this - it's going to bond right away I'll put a good quantity of CA glue on here and we'll stick it together so the purpose of this blade guard is so that the blade can exit the closed fence the fence that is closest to the operator and therefore a fully cut through your material and it'll have a place to go a hole in which the blade can go inside of that pocket and we can see it hopefully through that plastic and your hand doesn't have to be right there so you don't run the risk of slicing your thumb off maybe because you held the fence in the wrong spot and I think all table saw sleds should have some sort of a blade guard all right the constructions done I've stuffed a couple napkins up there so I don't spray lacquer on that and I've covered the top with tape and now we're gonna go ahead and put a nice coat of clear lacquer over the whole sled to protect it for a small sled like something that's half-inch thick for the sled bed I usually like to put lacquer or some sort of a protective finish on it just to inhibit moisture from absorbing into it and releasing from it and that will prevent it from warping over the long term and of course it looks nice keep some of the dirt and dust off makes a little bit easier to clean and keep clean before this video gets over I need to say thank you to all of my patreon supporters and all of my fans out there who helped support us by buying plans and watching our videos and sharing them without you guys we couldn't do this at all so thank you very much now when do just a light sanding on the bottom once the lacquer has dried and this is going to allow me to get a real smooth finish on everything and then we're going to put a paste wax on it I like the Minwax paste wax what we do is we take it and we apply this to the bottom of all of our sleds and jigs and things that go over the table saw or any other tool for that matter it allows them to slide with considerably less friction than they would otherwise have and it just makes all of your cuts a lot safer so we apply this let it dry for a few minutes then we take a clean rag and buff it off and it's just about done we can take the the tape off of the acrylic I put this on so that the lacquer didn't cloud it up when we were spraying that on and if you have glasses and you have an anti-static cleaner you can clean this acrylic top and bottom and sawdust doesn't stick to it so much when you're cutting so you can always see your blade through there all right well let's check it out and see how this works it should be a pretty smooth slider at this point we were trying to come up with a good name for this for the video we couldn't figure it out we're like the the not so extreme sled the the baby sled the super cute sled but we just decided on mini crosscut sled and yeah see that very low coefficient of friction that should be a really good sled for a long time to come and just as a comparison this is our primary sled which I think everybody should own a high-end quality sled and a small sled is also important to have but it really is an accessory with your large sled the small slide is for small parts or small table saws and has a more specific purpose the bigger sled of course is a much more general-purpose sled but sometimes you just want to pick up something light and you can see how this works here it's real convenient for parts just like this you can use a pencil eraser to hold down a part and cut and it's real effortless you can very safely get into close quarters and and cut real tiny things that you could not ordinarily cut with any other tool in your shop a lot of times people will cut small parts or blocks or things in their shop and when it gets down toward the end of the piece they have to sometimes throw away a piece that's four or five inches long because there's just no safe way to cut something like that smaller and a half's or thirds but with something like this you can see that's real easy and that'll wrap this one up thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Kings Fine Woodworking

Views: 959,987

Rating: 4.8930583 out of 5

Keywords: Woodworking, woodshop, woodworker, how to, diy, maker, free online course, learn woodworking, woodworking course, introduction to woodworking, intro to woodworking, woodworking class, crosscut sled, cross cut sled, table saw sled, free plans, mini crosscut sled, small crosscut sled, diy crosscut sled, cutting small parts, diy table saw sled, woodworking jig, jobsite saw sled, jobsite saw, Dewalt jobsite saw, Milwaukee jobsite saw, sawstop jobsite saw, make a crosscut sled

Id: m9RVf0adCIg

Length: 28min 10sec (1690 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 04 2018