How to Make a Circular Saw Guide

today I'm going to show you how to make a great guide or track for your circular saw and in the process I'm going to be showing you the mistakes I made so that you can avoid them when constructing yours now particularly if you're new to circular saws I think it's really important to understand a few things before you plunge into making your own saw guide so in the first part of this video I set the context so that you can understand which saw and guide is right for you but if you don't want to listen to all that skip to six minutes in where the bill begins before I get into how I made my guide let's have a very quick chat about why you need a circular saw like this in the first place and there's also a link coming up on the screen now to the video I place it on this a couple of years ago firstly it gives us DIYs a real chance to up our game you can cut full sheets of MDF or play meaning you no longer have to wait in Keith at the DIY store to get your timber cut you can make cross cuts you can make bevel cuts it made your lines on the handsaw and wood plane which is how I used to cut and finish all the wood for my woodworking projects if therefore dramatically speeds up your work and also your accuracy just on the three and half kilograms including battery I find its ultra portable and particularly battery versions like mine and not as scary as people think as you can see here with a lack of kickback when I trigger the cutting blade too close to the piece of wood and a price is starting from just under 80 pounds for a bear unit this is an affordable tool for you to add to your collection now most circuses come with a side fence which gives you the ability to cut a narrow strip of in my case 130 mil off your full length of timber and I have to say the side fence is enormous be effective but if you want wider widths than this unless you've got a soul guide you've got to clamp a straight edge to your piece of timber which is problematic as I'll come on to in a minute if I'm that desperate to make long accurate cuts why don't I just go buy myself a plunge saw I hear a lot of you shout and you'd have a good point because of course plunge cells are designed to run on Rails and various lengths from under me to right up to 5 metres and by running on those rails there are a lot more accurate than circular saws also as a name suggests they're designed to plunge at any point in the cut whereas a circular saw typically and does it cut at one end and leaves at the other yes you can plunge a circular saw by physically lowering the entire saw into the sheet that you're cutting or by releasing the depth lever but in either case you have to physically raise a guard and the plunge that you make is not as accurate and there are a couple other points firstly the plunge saw is superior for dust extraction because the entire blade is enclosed and of course by being enclosed that makes it much safer to operate but this is a thing with such superiority become limitations yes it has superior dust extraction but it's best used if plugged into an extraction hose and so typically these units work best in bespoke workshops or perhaps on-site attached to some sort of extraction system which most of us DIYs are not going to have it's also almost twice as heavy you're typically looking at five and a half kilograms upwards for a plunge saw and finally it's a lot more expensive and just to throw it further spanner in the works in case you weren't confused enough there are hybrid products out there like this evolution r1 85 which are circular saws designed to run on tracks remember the whole reason I'm doing this video today my circular saw the base is as flat as a pancake it's not designed to cling to any guide rails whereas this evolution has a groove which mates with a guide rail a feature you'd expect to see on a plunge saw base case you're wondering what I'm doing today with this evolution I was sent it over a year and a half ago to review and are just for what I'm one reason or another haven't got it out of its box I think it's partly testament to just how convenient and useful this little circular saw is but it's 74 pounds 99 although this is mains-powered it is worth looking at because you're getting a lot of tool for your money here it's a shame it doesn't come with any rails but you can get over a 1.4 or 2.8 liter kit although they took one a music it cost pretty much as much as the saw and I'll definitely be putting this through its paces on my upcoming wardrobe build project on the channel so you're sticking with your circular saw and you want a designing guide for it and you're confused about the options because there are seemingly so many different guides out there on the internet well I'm gonna make it very easy for you because there are three main options out there but only one of these is worth pursuing option one involves bolting some sort of a wooden guide piece that either has a groove or a rail in it to the other side of the saw which then slides up and down in another guide rail that you've got to fabricate now to my mind this is far too complicated to construct and you're really limiting the potential of this or cause you've also got to unbolt it when you want to use it normally the second option is probably the most common saw a guy doubt there as suggested by Ryobi themselves in this blog there are two major flaws with this design first is that particularly on full-length guide rails with this design you're going to get a low flex in the guide rail and then pass to prevent this I've had to screw my saw guide down to the piece of wood that I've been cutting to prevent that flex happening yes this guide rail should have been a lot wider but even then I'm saying you're still going to get some flex in your guide rail and the second problem is you have to have both hands firmly clamped on the circular saw and you have to physically push the saw against the rail which is why you get that flex in the rail that we just saw otherwise it wanders away like this and your cut is ruined so that brings us on to the third and to my mind only option you should be going for with your circular saw guide and this is the version with guide rails on both sides my inspiration for this was one-minute workbench I don't know whether there are early examples on the internet but I'm indebted to this guy and I'll include a link in the description below my video to his video to my mind this is as close as you'll get the precast aluminium plunge saw style guide rail with a guide on the side the saw cart wonder meaning you're no longer pressing the saw into the guide which created all that flex and you can use it effortlessly safely with one hand and with the observational holes you can line up your cut line with millimeter accuracy so onto the build itself and I decided to make two lengths of guide a shorter guide to deal with cutting across a sheet of ply or MDF and a longer guide to cut down the entire 2.4 4 meter length of the sheet in case you're wondering the why there are three guides on the table the holy grail of any saw guard is to minimize the depth of the base so as to maximize the cutting potential of the blade and you can see here with this Ryobi guide which was made from 3.2 millimeter hardboard so I decided to try and keep my base to a minimum this time by using nine-millimeter MDF or beer with 12 millimeter ply guide pieces on top to try and add a bit of strength rather than the thicker bases that you see on most YouTube videos however by the time I'd cut the observation holes and the cut line into the base there was far too much flex in the guide although to be fair when I experimented with this guide later in the day to cut down a piece of HTML India for a headboard I was making because of this design I don't need to exert any lateral pressure on the guide pieces there was no deviation of the blade in spite of the potential flex in the guide I rescued the smaller guide by gluing an additional 5 millimeter sheet of ply to the underside which has actually made it really rigid but for the purpose of today I'm gonna concentrate on the guide that I made with 12 millimeter ply a word on this plight it's called Chinese hardwood or exterior plier bought it from my local builders merchants but it's pretty dreadful stuff the glue between the laminate is either poor quality or non-existent and the laminates themselves are structurally all over the place or actually also non-existent in places if you can try and make yours from good quality ply and please if you've got any good ideas of where to source this stuff from do let us all know in the comment section below I don't have a workshop and so the perfect companion for cutting full sheets of MDF apply is a workbench and I use this hinged version I made a few years ago link to the video series will be in the description below the video don't worry if you haven't got one you can simply stretch one of your sheets of timber over a couple of sources and cut the others on top of that then it's really important to use some sort of sacrificial piece between the timber you're cutting and the table to protect the table but also so that your blade leaves minimal splinters in the other side of your cuts I found an old piece of six mil MDF in the garage and cut it in two to create a full tree stretching the entire length for the workbench and you can see here how effective it was next I decided to put a new blade on my thoughts be honest it didn't really need one as the old blade which I've had on the sofa as long as I can remember still looks pretty sharp I was initially unimpressed with his blades when I bought the saw as they're so thin but this makes them incredibly efficient in cutting three sheets of wood and if you set your saw rub right there is zero wonder and what I mean by this is it's critically important to accurately set the depth of the cutting blade ideally you want half of the two poking out just below the material that you're cutting through if you have much more than this or even the blade fully lowered as I did when I first bought the tool you'll find it wanders around all over the place even if you're trying to use a guide and I would have thrown the Soraa way if my carpenter made John hadn't pointed this out to me trick we're making a saw guide is to use the factory edge of your sheet as a perfectly straight edge to run your saw side fence down to create the guide pieces as these are the bits that your saw will run against and keep your cuts straight whilst the shorter guide rail had eighty millimeter wide strips after the problem with the flexing and also to potentially accommodate hinges at some point I increase the width of the guide pieces to 110 millimeters although I reduced the end pieces of the guide to 90 millimeters as I was concerned to maximize the cutting length of the guide my battery powered leaf blower is a fantastic way to keep my workbench clean in between cuts I don't know what I'd do without him but 110 millimeters of guide pieces cut I can lay them onto the base section and Mark off the approximate width of this in my case three hundred and fifty five millimeters make it a little wider than esterase you can always trim it down with your circular saw when the guys complete I cut the base section by using as a saw guide a piece of the 9 millimeter and EF left over from the aborted earlier builds clamp down to the work area with a couple of Axminster trade clamps I think a links in the description below the video as we discuss circus saws on grater plunging so you want to oversize the length of your board so that the saw can enter the piece you're cutting with the blade already lowered to the correct height note how far from the edge the cutting blade is you want to measure from the center of the blade to where you want your saw guide to end and add this to the size of the board you want to cut with a little extra margin for error in my case here 2 4 400 millimeters a typical length of the sheet of MDF apply I've made my saw guide to 900 millimeters long in total I needed to add an extra piece of ply to the end of my saw guide to make it up from 2 4 400 millimeters - to 900 and to do this I use biscuit joints and freehand routed the grooves with a biscuit joint bit on my router because by now after my earlier I bought a saw guide effort I was running out of ply the eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that this extension piece of ply was itself biscuit jointed together it's length as I did not have a piece left that was wide enough without doing this it was a searingly hot day and after clamping the joins together with my old wedge clamp linked which is coming up now the joint was set sufficiently to carry on with the build just an hour or so later a quick sound of the rough edges and it was on to the wood glue which had to be spread quickly in the heat with my continental filler knife and then tacked into place at one point six by twenty millimeter panel pins if you can get hold of some sort of straightedge either a long spirit level or here I'm using an old section of aluminium I salvaged from a skip and you can use this to slide up and down the guide piece to check you've got it completely straight before you glue and nail it down to the base and now for the tricky bit the second parallel set of guide rails which sandwich your saw into the guide you want to allow a micro amount of space in the guide channel so that the circular saw slides unimpeded I started with a piece of paper against the edge of the saw bed but ended up dispensing with this and simply sliding the saw up and down as I attacked each guide feet into position you might find it easier to take the blade out of your sort to do this although I would have just about had enough clearance if I lift it in to get the spacing right I'd dry tact the guide in place and then when I was happy with it I spread out my glue and then carefully relocated the nails in the holes I'd made a moment earlier I could then glue the end pieces in position checking they were square with my bucko many combination square my circular saw has an extrusion at the back which interferes with the end section of the saw guide so I routed a groove into the guide with a little quarter inch shank trim router featured in a recent video it was then time to draw the cut line on my guide which I did by holding a pencil into the cut indicator on the front of the saw bed you want a driller observation hole for making the customer base and I decided to spread these much further apart and I have in the prototype guide that I've made with a nine millimeter thick MDF base as after all if you're cutting a straight line you only need to check it in a few places so my holes are spaced 250 millimetres in from the inside end and 740 millimetres apart and I used the 50 one millimetre cutting bit in this bosch set a half the number of years all that remained was to make the cut down the length of the guide if you can I recommend lowering the blade into the guide with a depth clamp for at least rather than trying to lower than five bags of swords the guide be honest this is the trickiest part of the process as it's very hard to get a reliable straight plunge as you'll see here although if your sword does wander a bit making this initial plunge just true up the cut as I've done here as it won't affect the accuracy of your sword guide when you start using it I could have pretended this didn't happen but I want you to be alert to this issue to give you the best possible chance of doing yours accurately oh and don't leave your improvised dust bag unzipped like I did and on to the flex of this new improved guide if I really tug at it I can get it to move a millimeter or two which I'm really happy with for a guide of this length particularly as I saw won't be exerting any such pressure during each cut so what's the conclusion to all this well I think you've got a lot of cuts to make possibly in a trade context then the plunge saw is probably the right tool for you and no doubt you'll be able to justify with all those cuts the higher acquisition costs however the rest of us to our wise who want a lovely little versatile tool that can do a range of things at an affordable price then the circular saw is perfect and hopefully from today's video you've seen that with a bit of planning you can make yourself a soar guide to extend the use of this tool to an even greater level and you could even add some anti-slip pads to the underside of your saw guide let me know your thoughts in the comment section below and perhaps even if you've been able to further hone in this design yes the longer guide in particular is a bit of a heavy lump but even if you've got a three meter aluminium track you have a bit of a headache working out where to store it and people generally find a bit of empty space on the garage wall to hang it on I'm currently pondering whether I can hinge my longer track in the middle to make it more portable easier to store without weakening it to such a degree that I reintroduce all that flex that I have to try so hard to remove details of all today's tools will has ever been in the description at the end of the video which don't forget you can access on your smartphone by clicking on the little arrow and your computer by clicking on the show more button if you've liked today's video please give it the thumbs up below and if you're new to my channel I would love to have you subscribe you can do that by clicking on the link here and don't forget to click on the Bell notification icon so you get notified of all my future uploads you'll also find there a link to my Amazon store see you soon

Channel: Charlie DIYte

Views: 169,095

Rating: 4.9250255 out of 5

Keywords: how to make a circular saw guide, track saw guide, track saw, circular saw, diy track saw, how to make a track saw, saw guide, circular saw guide, track saw diy, diy circular saw guide, homemade track saw, circular saw jig, circular saw track, saw track, circular saw guide rail, how to use a circular saw, track saw vs circular saw, diy track saw guide

Id: mvcPuUz_m74

Length: 15min 37sec (937 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 10 2020