Homemade Panel Saw - DIY Saw and We Only Spent $100

[Applause] so so hey it's brock here from rock hill farms and today i want to show you our homemade panel saw now if you've watched the channel you're probably aware that i have a manufacturing business up here in this shop but i haven't really shown much about how we do things other than our homemade craig drill press today i've got my dad with me because he designed the panel saw and that drill press and so we're going to show you kind of how it's made and how we use it so when we started this business we knew we were going to process a lot of plywood and trying to cut sheets of plywood on a table saw in volume just isn't practical it also wasn't practical for us to try to buy a panel saw they were a couple thousand dollars at this point i could easily buy a panel saw for this job but we've cut a hundred sheets of plywood a week for four years on this saw with very little maintenance and very little issues so i don't see a reason to upgrade it all right so my dad built the saw and he's going to walk you through some of the finer points of it it started off with just a simple wooden frame that holds the sheet so maybe the first thing we'll show is just loading sheets onto it and then we'll make a cut with the saw and then talk about kind of how it's built so i can't tell you what it would cost you to build this saw from scratch i can say that almost everything that went into it is stuff that we just already had laying around like the pipe and some of the wood and so we spent very little maybe 100 or less [Applause] all right i didn't see you get out of tape measure how did you know what size those sheets were we've had we have preset stops uh we ran run about three different basic cuts one is 32 which is a third of a sheet then we cut a 30 inch cut and a 40 inch cut and we like i say we've got preset stops for them and they just set on to the saw and each one of them has a fine-tuning adjustment bolt so if something gets a little out of kilter you can adjust it back to where it's the right size all right so this is the 32 inch stop you just slide the sheet up against it and it'll hit right right here and you know you're 32 inches from the blade if anything gets out of whack you can adjust it like he was saying here so if you're not making the exact same product over and over again but you're doing more of a custom thing you can do what we've done on our miter saw which is to take a three foot metal rule and screw it down to the frame and you could just as easily clamp a block at the mark that says 22 inches or 31 inches and slide up to that stop that is clamped on so this is our miter saw or one of our miter saws it has that scale on the back and a block clamp to it now we use a lot of repeated measurements again here so we clamp it there and then for one part we use one stop and another part we use two and so we can do full sets of parts with only moving this clamp once but this could be used if everything you cut was you know different lengths all right we uh i built a carriage here that just rolls on casters these casters are about two dollars each they're pretty inexpensive um this just well a black pipe i think if i were to ever make another one it would be better if it was square tubing and also i think if i built another one i would make one sides rigid and have the other one where i could fine tune adjust it now to make this easy to pass through the wood you run a cable up and over pull it with a counterbalance i can move this saw up and down with one finger and without the counterbalance it would be a struggle to do and where you were talking about adjustment that would be done where the pipe goes through the top and bottom boards you could have an adjustment bolt up there right yeah absolutely something similar to what we use on our stops and the circular saw is just screwed to that bottom board i believe it's got one board like clamps on to it right a board screws down over this flip here that holds it pretty rigid and we virtually all the saws have a folded up edge it stiffens the metal and i just cut a groove in the board it sets over that clip and screws down it holds it pretty secure that means when we saw thousands of sheets if we burn up a motor on a skill saw we can just grab any other skill saw basically and it's going to work with this setup yeah and you can get the saw at any hardware you're not waiting three weeks to order some motor from china that's actually been the best part of it we have used a couple skill saws and i've replaced a couple rowers inexpensive items can get them anywhere the counterweight is run on a 5 16 cable and the the pulleys that we use are actually garage door pulleys they're they're a good wheel with a bearing in them the metal that they've lasted the first set i put on was a little cheaper they didn't last very long these have lasted about three years now with no trouble all right so now another part of this that um my dad kind of struggled with setting up was the bottom rail number one it has to be a really hard wood because it's getting material slid across it a lot and the other end actually has a metal channel with a piece of hardwood on it but this has to have some degree of adjustment because over time this wooden frame is going to get out of square a little bit and need adjustment so i'm going to zoom in and try to show you where the adjustment is on this bottom rail all right so here you can see the bottom rail that we load the wood onto you see this portion is metal and that's because we are building this out of what we had and not spending any money on it ideally this entire bottom rail would be metal but however you build it right behind where the cutout is for the blade has to be reinforced so that that is not a weak point now you can see down here there's an adjustment bolt this is a lag screw that creates a pivot point and there is another adjustment bolt down at that end to keep this bottom rail com perfectly perpendicular to the saw blade when we first started using this panel saw it seemed like we had to adjust these bottom bolts quite a bit to keep the saw square once we got to the point that we knew we weren't going to need to move it anymore we went ahead and anchored the saw into the concrete on the ends we have small l brackets with concrete screws and then on the back side we have angle iron with larger diameter concrete anchors now that it's held in place it doesn't require adjustment nearly as often so if you're into woodworking and do-it-yourself projects you should check out our video on this homemade pocket hole jig set up as well it's a lot more efficient than anything else we have found so were just talking about making sure we covered everything that someone would want to know about this and we just had a couple more points one was the adjustment wrenches we made all those bolts and nuts the same size so we only need two wrenches and we hang them on the saw and then dad was going to tell you a little bit about what we're going to do for dust collection we've been through the shop working on making everything in here hook up to dust collection but we haven't got this one done yet so want to kind of tell them what your plans are for that yeah if you run this it becomes very apparent that most of the sawdust is coming from right here in this area so my intention is to build a little wooden box here with a place to hook a dust port on and put the groove to help hold the saw right here in the side of the box then we'll run a flex pipe up on a another or attach to this counterweight so that it'll move up and down with the saw freely so my original thought was that there are companies that make kind of a high dollar circular saw that has a dust collection port on the back but if you've ever used a saw and hooked it up to a dust collector you know that it gets a percentage of dust nothing's going to get a hundred percent but i think the box on the side that he's talking about will get a lot higher percent of the dust than you would get out of a port on the back of the saw and this is a 59 dollar scale saw you can buy just about anywhere and the the ones with the special little shoot are about 300 and you've got it you've got to order them or drive a long distance to find one it's just a lot more practical to have something that is inexpensive that you can repair yourself so hopefully we've covered everything that you might want to know about our panel saw we're really proud of it because like i said at the beginning it's been four years now cutting at least 100 sheets a week on average and it's held up and done a great job so i appreciate you taking the time to watch the video in a minute you'll see links on the screen to a couple more of our videos and i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Rockhill farm

Views: 36,377

Keywords: Diy panel saw, homemade panel saw, home made panel saw, panel saw plans, how to build a panel saw, building a panel saw, wood shop tour, shop tour, woodworking, woodworking shop tour, panel saw, farm vlog, rockhill farm

Id: kWPZI_fJZxc

Length: 11min 23sec (683 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2021