Build a Better Router Sled/Flattening Jig

hello welcome to my shop today I'm working on making a router sled now I've seen a lot of videos online of people making router sleds with plywood boxes and I'm sure those are great but I wanted something that works a little bit smoother so I started looking online at some of the big name brands now some of those can reach into the thousands of dollars and I'm not looking to spend that kind of money so what I'm doing here today is making a router set of my own with materials that I bought off of Amazon and in total I'll have under 200 into this project and I'm going to show you exactly what I've done so that you can also do it if you'd like what I have is two 79 inch linear rails and two 59 inch linear rails I have a carriage that I built with some scrap plywood and some two inch aluminum angles now the concept behind this is simple the long rails are going to set on each side of my workbench the short rails are going to ride in between and it's all on these bearings that are going to allow the router sled to move in both directions very smoothly and very efficiently so now I'll show you what I've done so far starting with making the carriage we're going to cut the aluminum angles to match the plywood base you'll want the base to be just wide enough for your router so that you can utilize as much of the length of your rails as possible then clean up all your birds we're going to lay out and drill some holes for attaching the angles to the plywood base then you want to carefully lay out the holes for the bearings I would suggest oversizing these holes just a little bit next we're going to lay out our plywood base for the router and for the shopvac attachment I used the base plate from the router to easily lay out the holes drill from the front and then drill again from the back side to countersink the holes a two and a half inch hole saw was perfect for both my shop vac attachment and for my router I'll be using a two inch spoil board bit for my router so a two and a half inch hole is perfect then we're going to attach the angles to the plywood base I found that using a couple of spacers helped keep everything aligned here I'm attaching the rotor base I chose to use my plunge router but really you can use whatever you like I found this shopback adapter that has a flange and mounting holes already on it so just cut off what I don't need and attach to the base here I'm just planting down a 2x4 to use for my mounting blocks figuring the height of my rails and the thickness of the wood that I'll be flattening I needed my mounting blocks to be an inch and a quarter thick I chose to cut my mounting blocks down I suppose you could leave them full length but then you run the risk of the 2x4 trying to warp or twist maybe causing some deflection in the rails I think it's best to cut them down then just pre-drill or attach with some screws now we're going to attach the upper rails to the lower rails Slide the bearings onto each Rail and then set the upper rails on top of those bearings that attach with some screws my rails happen to come pre-drilled and they actually worked out perfectly for me but you can pre-drill and countersink holes to make this whatever width you want it to be now I'm going to attach the carriage to the upper rails Slide the bearings on and we're going to set the carriage in place I chose to use all 16 bolts to attach mine you maybe wouldn't need that money but this is where oversizing those holes came in very handy foreign using the carriage to maintain the width we're going to add stiffeners to each end this is going to keep the rails from racking side to side which will cause the bearings to bind [Music] some simple three-quarter inch wood screws is all you need to hold this in place foreign [Music] foreign so there we have it we've got a flattening jig that moves smoothly in both directions we've Incorporated dust Port so we can attach the shop back in this entire setup cost me under 200 I hope you enjoyed this video I hope you learned something if you did please like And subscribe for that matter if you didn't please like And subscribe stay tuned for the next video we're going to put this thing to work

Channel: Idealwoodworks

Views: 314,636

Keywords: router sled, flattening jig, router, live edge, river table, wood working, diy, table, slab, how to

Id: _NVZfQnIJuY

Length: 7min 6sec (426 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 09 2023