A Crosscut Sled Like No Other

hi I'm Mike and I'm gonna show you how I built this very cool table saw slide so stick around alright so maybe you're in the same boat as me I wanted to build a new table saw sled for my table saw here and the thing I've seen in all these table saw sleds that I see online the big ones are really big and heavy and just really bulky and the little ones are small and they can only handle so much stuff right so what I wanted to do was make one that was big but not heavy and that way I can put it on use it and do what I need to do and then take it off and put it away and it's out of my way and that way it's easy to use so I got to thinking what can I do to make my idea come true so the first step was to cut some plywood down to size using this circular saw but they attachment that allows you to cut parallel cuts is a half-inch thick plywood here now I'm just laying out some lines here and I'm going to cut away some of the excess material here [Applause] and here I'm using the hole saw with the drill press to drill a whole bunch of holes into the table in an idiot to lighten it as much as possible [Music] [Music] here I'm laying out some parts that are going to be attached to the table and now I'm cutting them out using the drill press and the pants off [Music] [Music] all right so you can see the pieces that I made so far and I'm gonna show you how they go together so this one goes down here and just fits into that notch like that and this one goes right here the same thing so now I'm going to just use some pocket screws to join this together [Music] alright so we have this assembly here you can kind of see what what I got going now these pocket screws some of them worked out some of them didn't so this one didn't really hold but that's not really gonna matter because you'll see in a second why it doesn't matter here you can see the wood assembly that I showed you in that previous shot and along with a piece of laminate material and I'm about to join those two pieces together I'm going to use laminate glue on both surfaces and then join those two parts and here you can see I've already applied a layer of that contact cement to the laminate material and now I'm working on applying it to the board assembly that I made so here you can see I'm taking the board and I'm flipping it over and placing it onto the glued laminate surface see I'm trying to line it up just right then once I got it in place I took the roller that I got this laminate roller and he used that to apply pressure to it to make it bond well and then after that I flipped it over and and I used the laminate ruler on the backside next I used my rotary cutting tool to cut away some of the excess laminate material that was beyond the shape of my wooden assembly that way gets a little closer to the final size it's going to be and here you can see how it looked after I was done trimming away all that excess material and I also use my hand drill with a hole saw attachment to cut away eivin's openings depending if they had opened up and then they just vacuumed up all the dust that I just created from all that cutting and then it was time to prepare the second piece of laminate that's going to go on the backside of that board assembly so I spread that laminate cement onto the laminate material and then applied a coat to the board assembly as well and now I am attaching that second laminate piece to the board assembly trying to get it lined up really well and again removing the excess laminate material on the backside of that assembly now I took the assembly inside and I'm using my router table with a laminate trimming bit to clear away that edge there and you can see at the end here how it turned out and you can see a little better on this side how that trimming works you can see how all the excess material comes off and you get this nice clean edge and then finally I used the chamfer bit in the router table to just kind of break that corner all right so look at what we got going so far looking pretty cool huh kind of crazy looking so what we're gonna do now is make some runners for it and I've got this sharing the chair here I'm going to use and here I'm just taking that cherry material that I showed you and trimming it down so that don't fit into the grooves in my table saw and now I'm preparing to mark the table for where the runners will be attached so I placed some pennies in the table saws grooves and then I laid the runners on top of the pennies and then I laid the table on top of the runners line it up as best I can and then start marking where the runners are located and then I flipped the table over and drew some guidelines so I can see exactly where the runners are going to be attached so I need to scuff up these two areas here before I apply the epoxy because this stuff's slipping and then I applied the epoxy to the runners and then I carefully lower the table onto the runners got it lined up and pressed it down put some weights on it to keep it in place and now we just give it a chance to dry it's time to do now [Music] or you can see I just cut through this part and it still have these outer sections that pulled it together all right now it's time to make a fence work and now I'm drilling some holes using a hole saw to create the two ends of the hand hole and now I'm using a router bit and then I'll be connecting those two holes [Music] [Music] and then finally a musical ground over bit in the router to smooth over the edges of those hand holes all right sounds getting ready to mount this fence on here and I was gonna put it right here which is right on the bottom edge of the table but then I thought you know if I slide it down a little bit like this it will give me that much more room on the table to use larger pieces and I still get all the support I need for the fence so I'm gonna do that alright so I've got the fence all set I put that cutout over here so it'll clear this cut out over here and I'm gonna line it up like this and go ahead and mount it so I'm just gonna use some epoxy to attach it since this is like a plastic material okay and so for your information I did scuff this up here so that it'll accept the epoxy better and then this is just the bare wood so I'm gonna just glue that right here and in order to square it up I'm just gonna use this square here I've seen some other new techniques that people are using I think this square is plenty adequate to get this thing squared up so that's what I'm going to do okay put some weights on it for now over here all right so we're gonna leave it to dry see how it turned out all right I gave the fence a chance to dry and all I need to do now is cut through here so I've got that part done so let's do that right now all right so I've got the fence cut through and I'm ready to try the sled now I notice one thing that I've got these splitters here I don't know if you can see that but when I pull this sled back the splitters hit and that in that hole there so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take those out right now so they'll give me more room for my for my piece that I'm gonna cut okay so now I can pull this all the way back here like so all right we're gonna try this now so set this up here all right all right ready [Applause] [Music] okay here's our piece let's see I got this square here let's see how good that is yeah that's good that is very good and then I'm gonna try measuring it with this caliper here so we got a six point seven one two at the bottom and we got six point six eight four six months six eight three at the top so that's what 23 plus 33 33 thousandths out of square over whatever that distance is I think that's pretty good I'm happy with it over 15 inches so I think that's really good I'm just gonna close with just a review of all the great features of this sled so of course very unique design right it kind of looks like a bat wing or something like that very sleek this thickness is what the fence is 3/4 inch thick this the table is about 1/2 inch thick runners or 3/8 so what is that entering a quarter what inch and five-eighths that is a thin sled right and just really easy to handle because all those hold I put in that in the table inside of there that that helped a lot and of course these handles here that forces you to put your hands out here there is no chance you would not want to put your hands down here right there was no reason to put your hands down here so kind of a built-in safety feature I really like that came out really nice and of course the course is laminate material I put on it to cover those holes it also gives you a really nice clean surface and it does slide really nice I haven't uh I'm gonna wax those runners but this thing I really like how it slides so let me know what you think is it cool or not let me know in the comments

Channel: I've Been Thinking Workshop

Views: 914,483

Rating: 4.4074922 out of 5

Keywords: Table saw sled, I've Been Thinking Workshop, Table saw, DIY, Woodworking, Cross Cut Sled, crosscut sled, Table saw accessories, Tools, Jigs, Easy crosscut sled, Best crosscut sled, simple crosscut sled, how to make a crosscut sled, jig, ive been thinking, laminate

Id: nXNp9S1JTGc

Length: 16min 16sec (976 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 11 2017