Crosscut Sled - Build a Table Saw Crosscut Sled

hi i'm rob cos and welcome to my shop an accurate cross-cut sled i think is probably the most valuable jig you can make for your table saw i do mine a little bit differently stay with me i'll show you how i'm rob cosman and welcome to my shop we make it our job to help take your woodworking to the next level if you're new to our channel make sure you subscribe and hit the notification bell which will alert you whenever we release a new video anytime we use a new tool or technique we'll leave a description down below so that make it easier for you to find all right let's get back to work there's more than one way to cross cut lumber or plywood on your table saw almost all table saws come with a miter gauge which is adjustable and that's part of the problem with them once they become adjustable they can be knocked out of adjustment you can also use a chop saw but i think a shop made accurately made cross-cut sled is the best for the job and i'm going to give you several reasons some you may not have thought of first of all problem with a miter gauge is you're only referencing off of one slot and what will eventually happen is or it may happen just when you get it new is that you've got slop within your gauge and you can fix that by painting actually these this one has little uh little set screws in there that you can you can adjust so that they stick out and they take up some of that slop however you still only have one reference you don't have a whole lot of surface area here although you can easily add something to it but this one i have a lot of complaints about because it just does not tighten up and stay tight so that i cross that one off my list in most circumstances chop saws they may be good for carpentry but for furniture i don't think you're going to find they're as accurate as you want so what makes why why a crosscut slit well for one thing you you can make it as big as you want they're shop made mine happens to be 36 and by the way i've made several of these they eventually get beat up and have to be replaced and every time i do i try to improve it with something that i've learned from the previous ones so it's 36 by 23. i have no idea why come up with the 23 other than really irritating to go to cut a piece of plywood and it's just a little bit too wide so i made that wide enough that i could get most everything i deal with in terms of width that's actually gives me just shy of 20 and three quarters in there so what i really like about it is a you've got lots of support for your piece like i said you can make these as wide as you want b if you're cutting something really small you can come unlike a miter gauge well of course you can always put a fence on but with this you can you can bring your piece right you've got support on both sides you don't have to worry about that piece getting caught in there because it's going to sit on the table the other nice thing if you're having to cross cut something that's already got a finish on it the last thing you want to do is run that across your fence apart me across your table you never know there's always going to be some little nicks or glue bob something in there and that'll leave a mark with a crosscut sled everything's moving together this is not moving across the sled and it's the best way to preserve that a couple of points on what makes a good cross cut slit number one you want your fence this fence has to be perfectly straight absolutely straight so if you've got a long straight edge you can put on there that has to be straight number two you want it to be square square to your table you want that to be standing plumb and number three you you don't want any slop in your ways now if you flip this over so i i've used osage orange just because it's hard it wears well and seems to slide quite easily and i'll walk you through exactly how i do that but because it wears you wouldn't want to use pine underneath here you want something you're going to get a lot of life out of but you don't want any side to side slop in this and if you can eliminate that providing you've got this fence perfectly square to the blade you're going to be really happy with the way this turns out so the base is made out of three-quarter inch mdf you could go with thicker mdf but you got to remember that the thicker the immaterial the less capacity you have under your blade so if you typically have three inches and you use a one inch sled now you're down to two inches half inch i don't think it's quite heavy enough so i use three quarter inch mdf for this for the actual base now when you once you use this you're going to separate these two pieces so in doing that you've got to make sure that you've got good support front and back so i used a piece of pine here just because at the time that's all i had that was thick enough it borrowed me wide enough and has to be wide enough because you're eventually going to use the full capacity of your blade and when you do you're cutting into this substantially so i still have what looks to be about two and a half inches of material and that happens to be an inch and three eighths of an inch thick so that does is going to do a pretty good job and these are always glued and screwed to both sides down here on the front on your fence you want something that's stable obviously but you also want something that's relatively hard it takes a fair bit of abuse so this is a piece of birch and i'm using uh inch and 7 16 probably started off an inch and a half and this one is 34 and a quarter inches long so i kept it just inside that really doesn't matter it didn't need to come all the way out to there now this one is going to get cut through as well so by the time i've made a full pass or a full height pass through here i've only got a quarter of an inch of material left and that really isn't enough to satisfy me so what i did is i took a piece of you know 5 8 inch baltic birch plywood and i glued and screwed it to the back side obviously stayed clear of where the blade is going to be and by bringing that up high it helps to strengthen this these two pieces and because it's in here it's not in my way i'm able to lean over and see everything i need to and i can get my hands fairly close something else you want to think about too is oftentimes you're going to want to clamp a stop on here so it's nice to have the capacity to get a clamp on that's one other reason why i like to keep this nice and tall our first task is to get the base perfectly square so i've broken this down a little bit this is three quarter mdf what i have is a piece that is 61 by 25 i want to have 24 by 36. i'm going to go just a little bit wider this is this is what would normally be a factory edge just came out of a much bigger sheet and you can't always trust your factory edge but i'm going to use it right now to at least get my 36 i'm gonna go a little more than 36 because i have to have a little bit of room to adjust so i'll go 36 and a quarter that'll be enough i said normally you'd have your miter gauge over here and you'd push it through but miter gauge isn't long enough to engage so i've got to turn it around and push this against the miter gauge a little bit of gymnastics involved keep that tight i know that edge is straight i cut it a little bit wider than i want simply because i had a factory edge and i always worry about the factory edge swelling up sucking up a bit of moisture depending on how it sat so i trusted that edge and it turned out i was right now i'm going to turn it this way and i'm going to bring it down to my final width which is going to be the 24. 43 and a 16 and 43 and a 16. all right so our base is ready okay we've got all the components the base i'll give you these dimensions this is ended up being a little shorter but we had to fix it so we ended up being 35 and three-quarter by 24. this is our fence it's actually made out of maple not birch i designed this to be just a little bit short doesn't go all the way to the end so this is 35 by three and three quarter by an inch and seven sixteenths thick that's actually going to have a rabbet cut in it but we'll do that later my back piece for support is pine it's 14 by six and a half by an inch and a half and a front support piece is three quarter inch baltic birch and that is eleven by five i think what i'll do is i'll cut over three quarter and then we'll trim that to fit but i've got to switch out my blade i don't want to try to cut a piece of rip a piece of purple heart with a fine tooth cross cut oh kill me now i don't know what this is going to do when i cut this piece off it may twist so i'm to salvage it i'm going to set that for 7 8 of an inch just in case i have to come back in and join it again [Music] that stayed nice and straight so i'll cut that down closer [Music] actually before i go any further i'm going to go over and i'm going to hand plane that surface okay that'll be my reference now we'll keep easing into that until we finally get it to sit down in there [Music] now we'll start taking a series of passes and this is going to be a lot of walking back and forth [Music] so okay so these that slides just the way i want it in both slots no slop but it moves so what we'll do is determine the depth so that's 7 16. so i'm going to cut these 3 8 and then we'll put a little spacer in the bottom i'm going to use the bandsaw to cut them okay now that doesn't slide freely it's a little bit stiff but that's the way i want it i'll adjust it from there okay now we need to have this sitting up above the surface a little bit so what i'll do is cut a couple of pieces [Music] since we're going to use my fence we're going to use my fence i need that fence to be absolutely parallel to the blade or parallel to the miter slot in use i always have it so that it's splayed just a bit so that when you're ripping boards the back side of the tooth coming up doesn't score the side of the wood so it just it's a little more open at the back than is at the front but i've got to change that and it's easy enough to do is lock this in position and me use my square and you can hear it hitting the side of the slot i don't want to just clear okay that just clears so i need to advance this not much okay i think that is seems to be identical okay i'll leave that right there now with that set what we can do is put these shims down in the bottom and then set these in place and we want to determine where we want this to be glued and i think 36 just going to get a feel for it actually i usually end up wanting less on this side so i'm going to set that i think i'll bring it over right about here lock that in place now a little bead of glue right down the middle make sure those are in place don't want that glue to come too close to the edge i just don't want i have to be digging glue out of the corners keep that tight now i'm gonna i'm just gonna sit here and lean on it making sure it stays tight to the fence i'll lean on this for five minutes and then i've got some big hunks of granite over there i'll put on there and use it as a clamp and let that sit for at least 20 minutes okay anything will work bags of sand weights just enough to give it some pressure until that has a chance to set up okay 20 minutes under a lot of pressure one of the reasons you want to make sure it's dry is that when you're pulling this out you don't accidentally pull them off okay now i'm going to use number six by one inch and i'm also going to go in after i use this counter bore i'm going to go in and and drill an even bigger hole through the through the purple heart yeah i don't want any threads touching that and i don't want the possibility of it splitting or even spreading it at all not that i think it would so we'll go about an inch in and then uh where we go 6 12 and 18. so inch inch six 12 18. that should hold it now i've got this set for just a little bit longer than the screw and i've got plenty to spare i've got an inch and three i've got uh actually i don't have as much as i thought i've got three eighths and three quarter which is an inch and an eighth and i've got a screw that's an inch so i'm all right so when i put that screw in the hole as a result of the countersink bit it's biting into the purple heart and i don't want that so i've got a drill that's should be the same diameter as the outside of the threads i just got to be careful not to that's better now i might have to do this after i've put the fences in place just to be able to hold on to it i'm going to take my one inch chisel these are ibc so you can take the handle off and i'll show you why i want to be able to hold it like that to scrape in the areas where there's where it's rubbing you've got to get the light just right in order to see this right along here [Applause] so like a scraper it'll allow you to take off just a little bit [Applause] and this usually takes several um trial and error i don't want to take two off too much because then i lose my fit the idea is to get it just right i'm just looking for areas where it rubbed enough to leave a little burnished spot now as i get closer closer to having it fit just right i'll only go in and remove one mark at a time but it's still stiff enough that you got to go through the whole range of motion because you don't want it to move freely and then right at the last little bit it sticks very annoying when you're trying to do a make a real careful cut and all of a sudden you run into that resistance oh did that at just the right time so now if i push that over i'm going to cut this rabbit there's nothing sacred about this i'm just going to use it as a reference i'll cut it to about there so what i'll do is set the fence for quarter of an inch bring the blade up just a little [Music] try that that's deep enough and then this is this these edges are parallel so i should be able to do it from this side [Music] this is my face that we're going to reference our boards off of so it'll sit like this on the shooting board so i think what i'll do is i'll reference off of this face and i'll cut a slot back to about there yeah a second now let's do this again doesn't need to be very deep and do it again just to get a nice so [Music] now i want to check make sure that's square in case i have to adjust it press that down that's off a little bit so i need to take a little bit of material off of the inside blades always have a tendency to run out ever so slightly so i'm going to use what's called a uh ten and a quarter or a bench rabbeting plane if you don't have something like this you can always use a uh a shoulder plane it'll do the same job this is just a little easier to use now i want to cut flush to this side so what i'll do is the blade's always a little wider than the body of the plane push it so it's sticking out and then set it down like that and push down and now i know it's flush check the projection now if you notice the shaving the shaving is more on the inside than the outside which is exactly what i want [Applause] so we want to clamp we want to clamp down and we want to clamp this way at the same time i'll put this one on last just a little bit along there okay now do this carefully at first meaning put a clamp this way light pressure just enough to hold it then we'll put clamps this way it's in my way kind of have to be clamping in the same both directions at the same time okay so that'll pull that tight then i can pull that one down now in the middle i've got to use a couple of big clamps oh put that down on well here flip it this way that might hold better i can kind of go down into that groove i'm going to move this clamp over pull that tight and do the same thing out here pull that in tight now i'm going to put one two more clamps on that okay so okay now put this one on now this is just to offer some support to the two pieces that get separated as soon as you run the saw through them so i don't have to worry about it being perfectly square like the last one and we'll just center it using the rails now clamp that one in place all right we'll clean that off once it gets a little bit rubbery all right our last piece is that support piece that goes back here the on this set was always the best glue spreader all right hand me that block of wood right there i'm gonna put it underneath that lip [Music] up [Music] so we'll get one out here [Music] run out here [Music] [Music] so now i've only got the two rails guides that are resting so i'm gonna push right here so it stays [Music] [Applause] okay final test i've got a piece of half inch mdf it's laying straight against the fence we built everything using this square right on [Applause] what would we do if it wasn't out or wasn't on probably start over anyway good luck great piece of kit probably the best shop made implement for your table saw if you enjoy my method of work and like my style of teaching click on any one of these videos to help take your woodworking to the next level now i've always said better tools make the job so much easier if you click on the icon with the plane and the chisel it'll take you to our website introduce you to all of our tools that we actually manufacture right here as well as our workshops both in person and online good luck

Channel: RobCosman.com

Views: 21,199

Rating: 4.9200797 out of 5

Keywords: crosscut sled, crosscut sled for table saw, crosscut sled for table saw diy, cross cut sled for small table saw, diy cross cut sled, table saw sled diy, rob cosman, woodworking

Id: 5c6RTkKzpMY

Length: 33min 44sec (2024 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 23 2021