How to Make a Picture Frame Sled | This Improved Version is very Accurate

today i'm going to step up my picture frame making game by building this dedicated picture frame sled for my table saw we're also going to talk about some issues and things to consider if you are trying to adapt a project you saw online to your shop stick around [Music] welcome to this episode of homebuilt workshop my name is jeff welcome to my workshop and here in front of me this is my trusty 45 degree miter sled i use this sled for a lot of different things mainly picture frames and anything that well i really need to cut 45 degree angles on so this thing does a great job of cutting a 45 degree on one side of the piece then you can flip it around cut your 45 degree on the other side but a few things i've noticed with it the cut is not really repeatable since i don't have a stop block in there if i just put one on there added one it wouldn't really reference off of the rabbit that you would cut for your picture frame that leads to a bit of inaccuracy trying to measure the inside of the rabbit now there's some math and formulas you can do but who wants to do that another issue that i'm beginning to have with this is the runners have a little bit of slop i don't know if you can hear that while these were a nice snug fit i believe the wood has shrunk a little bit so now there's a little bit of play in there which causes your cut to be off just a tiny bit most of the time this isn't a huge deal but again we can improve on this so the main things that i'm going to improve with this new sled are going to be having some sort of a stop block for accuracy as well as creating new runners to eliminate that slop both of these things combined together should increase accuracy and repeatability when i make some future projects i spent a bit of time doing some research on different designs trying to figure out how i can work in all of the things that i want in my new sled and what i came across was a video put out by david pachuto of the youtube channel make something his sled has all the features that i want so really i think we're just going to build ours modeled after his it's going to be very similar if not identical to his so i got to give a shout out to david thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts and for building a pretty cool sled so let's jump right in and get this thing made the first thing that i'm going to make are some hardwood runners to fit in the slots on my table saw now my table saw is really wonky as far as the sizes of the slots so i'm just going to use my drum sander to thickness these for a nice snug fit you're going to have to cut these to fit your specific saw with the overall thickness fitting just right i'm going to head over to the band saw and rip off a couple of small strips of this wood then we'll send them through the drum sander again to get them down to the right height i want to make sure they sit just under the height of the saw table now i'm going to rip down an off cut of 3 4 inch plywood this is going to be the base of the sled and i'm using my circular saw because this piece is really too long to safely do it on the table saw so now i just need to attach the plywood to the runners but i got a feeling that this step might be a little bit tricky due to my table saw being so small i'll show you why the plywood for this sled is not going to get mounted straight across which is kind of what you would expect instead it gets mounted at an angle and then we're going to build a fence that goes here and holds everything at the 45 degrees to the blade so if i scoot this back and roughly line up this point with the blade you can kind of see the orientation that we need to hold this thing while gluing the runners to the plywood now in most of the builds that i've seen for similar sleds everybody has a big giant cabinet table saw and they're able to just slide the fence over use a speed square against the fence to set this board at a 45 degree angle i don't have any fence that i can do that with because my saw is so small so we got to get a little bit creative first i'm going to add some washers to the slots of the saw this is going to hold the rails up off the bottom now i'll add a little glue to the rails and drop the plywood piece roughly where it needs to go i'll use a speed square in the slots on the table saw to align the plywood at 45 degrees or at least as close as i can get it i gotta hold it in place while the glue dries once the glue dried and i removed the brick this should have been my first indication this was gonna be really tricky and there's our sled it does bind up just a little bit when it's pushed in farther i don't think that's to be a problem because really we're only going to be cutting in a little ways once we have a fence mounted on here if for some reason it becomes a problem i can always adjust those runners with some sandpaper i just raised the blade and cut a short slot in the side to set the angle of where the blade's going to go and hit record anyway you didn't miss anything super exciting raised the blade up just a little bit and made a shallow cut so i could set the position and we can begin getting the fence ready now we're ready to attach the fence or aka aluminum square i settled on this version basically because the material is much thicker and i think it's just going to be a little bit more durable over time plus it's going to give us a little bit larger groove size when it comes time to cut the groove for the stop block so we're going to get this guy attached now i'll use my old sled to cut some 45 degree miters on some quarter inch thick strips of wood these pieces are going to get attached to the square with double-sided tape on a square like this the shorter side is typically narrower than the longer edge and i've cut these strips of wood to be only as wide as the narrower side this is going to create an overhang on the wider side and we're going to need that for the stop block later on there we go spacers securely attached now with my blade raised up on the saw i'm going to use a combination of the speed square and an engineer square to get the fence set exactly 45 degrees to the blade as i'm trying to position this the weight back here is making this kind of want to tip we're going to trim this off later but for now to keep it in place we're just going to put a brick on it how about that well i think this is about as close as i can get it using this awkward style of measuring i've got the square lightly clamped in place so it doesn't move around keep in mind though that if you are off a degree or so it's really not going to matter the square is square at 90 degrees so as long as we secure this as close as we can to the blade even if this side is a degree under this cut's going to be a degree over so in the end you're going to get a perfect 90 degree angle another thing to keep in mind when you align your square to the blade we want to keep the long side of the square completely intact we want to be able to utilize the measurements that are etched into the square so you need to offset it just a little bit towards the short side so that the point of the square still stays there we're going to make a cut on this here in a little bit and we want to retain that point so you got to offset it just a little bit so your cut's actually going to go on that side to attach the square i'm just going to drill some holes and secure it with some screws [Music] now with our fence securely attached we can begin working on the stop block that's going to go along this side of the sled but first the scary part we need to continue this cut through the square word on the street is that you can cut this with a standard table saw blade never done that before let's see what happens hopefully i don't have to replace a blade after this here goes nothing to make this cut i've placed a piece of my quarter inch spacer underneath the front edge of the aluminum square since the corner of the square is basically unsupported i thought that having the spacer under there might prevent it from catching and wanting to bend down or something that wasn't scary at all it didn't even make a funny noise or anything i didn't really know what to expect i've never tried to cut aluminum with a table saw that worked pretty good got to keep that in mind for future projects now i can begin making the stop block i'm going to use a scrap of hardwood and cut a groove along one edge that's going to accept the blade on the square i use my newly created jig to cut it off at a 45 degree angle okay i was trying to wait till we got to the end to do the final trimming but with all this extra material back here it's too much weight and the thing wants to tip that's part of the reason i offset this back some i wanted some more of the weight on the front but it's still too much back here so we need to trim all this stuff down get rid of some of this excess material to make it a little more balanced and really so it's not poking me you think that voids the warranty still tips that's not good the problem with that is when you're trying to make a cut and it wants to tip now not only are you trying to hold your piece in place but you have to hold the thing down and that's just dangerous we're going to take another crack at that remove some more material see if we can get that weight to sit flat that's one of the downsides of this design on a very small saw if you have a giant saw this wouldn't be a problem because you have a lot more material on your table saw back here to support it but i just don't have that material so we got to find that right weight balance that's a bit better but there's still a little bit of tipping on the front i'm hoping that once we have the stop block in place as well as some reinforcement here around the edge that the extra weight is going to keep it down we'll find out we may have to even trim a little bit more i don't know i can't go too much farther let's see what happens when we get the stop block on there for the stop block i'm going to mount a toggle clamp that we'll be able to use to clamp the rubber foot down onto the ruler to lock everything in place the problem is this bolt is too short now i could get a longer bolt but i don't have any sort of rubber foot so rather than having to run to the store i'm just going to cut a recess in here that i'll be able to recess the clamp down into the block and i won't have to replace this bolt still a little bit loose even though i have the bolt all the way down as far as it goes it's still not quite tight and i don't want to take the mortise any deeper because then the screws will risk poking out the bottom for now i think i'm going to set this aside plus even with this on here it still tips a little bit so i got to figure out how to get better weight transfer to keep the front of this sled down i may have to trim a little bit more off the back i don't know i got to think about this for a minute sometimes those projects that you think are just going to be really quick and simple aren't necessarily quick and simple [Music] well after about a day or so of frustration experimenting and almost scrapping the project to move on to something different i think i finally have something that's going to work here's the jig and this is the version i'm going to go with for right now yes it does look a little bit different than when you guys last saw it but let me show you a couple things that i added to try to offset some of this weight i first added a couple blocks to the side and instead of just gluing these on i bolted them in place and used some countersunk bolts on the bottom the hardware i was hoping would add a little bit more weight i added a piece on each side it is offset enough so that a piece can still go through this way if i'm cutting a longer section i also added a block right up front also bolted on because i wanted the extra weight of the bolts now adding these pieces with the hardware did make a difference but i still was having the front edge tip up when the sled is slid back like this so back here i also tried to add some more weight by adding a couple rails here which actually worked really good because it gives me something to hold on to while i'm making a cut also this block here is also for some more weight plus it's a shield basically which is going to shroud the blade and keep my fingers away from that while i'm running the jig once i have these parts in place i went back again and i removed more material off of this side still to remove more weight that's hanging off the back and also over here on this corner i did cut this off this was square not really going to need this anyway and all of it is about trying to remove as much dead weight hanging off the back as i can i even figured out a way to make the original stop block work i did not have to make another one since i had to go to the hardware store anyway to get material to bolt the pieces on the front i picked up a longer bolt i had to extend the threads using a die and then i just glued on a piece of leather on the bottom and now it locks in place it holds really well to the bottom of the stop block i just used some spray adhesive to attach some sandpaper that gives it some grip once i slide it in place lock it down that thing is not going anywhere after all those changes still to remove some more weight off of the back edge i took a forstner bit to the bottom and i made swiss cheese out of the back edge this made a big difference as well now if i pull this jig back too far now it still tips up you can see there and again that is because the slots on my table saw are not t-slots there's no way for me to make a t-shaped rail that's going to lock itself in now if i'd have known this was going to be this big of an issue i would have set this square back even farther and left more material out front that would have offset a lot more weight and probably really eliminated all these other problems and things that i'm having to take care of just something i did not see i thought i was going to leave it back far enough to where it wasn't going to be an issue but i was wrong it happens sometimes let this be somewhat of a lesson really next time you see that new fancy gadget somebody building and you want to replicate that in your shop make sure to at least take a few minutes think how that's going to work with your equipment everybody has different equipment in their shops and what works really well for someone else may not for somebody else as in the case of my sled there are some issues that i saw with this going into it but really i didn't think it was going to be this much of a challenge to get a usable jig to work with my table saw now i definitely am not trying to discourage anybody from building a gadget or something that they feel they could use in their shop that is not the case i just want you to take a minute think through the process of how somebody else builds it and how you're going to relate that to the tools and materials that you have in your shop and don't be afraid to completely re-engineer the project to make it work for you now let's get on with it and i'll show you how this is going to work i've made up some stock to use for demonstration and i've already got the rabbit cut in there this is where the artwork and things like that would go just for fun we're going to build a frame that fits this piece this is a backer for an 8 by 10 photo we're going to make all of our cuts with the rabbit down the square is going to sit inside the rabbit so that this overhangs the square we're going to make all of our first cuts on the right and all of our second cuts on the left most of the videos you see online everybody has it the other way but they're not left handed so keep that in mind build your jig whichever way you're comfortable we're going to make our 10 inch sides first so we're going to slide the stop block over to where the edge of the block meets the 10 inch line lock it down with the stop block set i can make both of the 10 inch pieces using the exact same setup then i'll readjust my stop block to eight inches and i can make both of those pieces using this setup now we can just add a little bit of wood glue and clamp our frame together right off the bat with just the clamping pressure from this band clamp these joints are coming together really nice this is going to turn out really well if we put a square on there that is dead on square with the frame out of the clamps we can just add our artwork or whatever is going in your frame and we have a nice frame with square corners tight fitting miter joints and thanks to the adjustable stop block the opposite sides are all exactly the same size that's the key to getting a nice square frame no more guesswork now trying to cut exactly on the pencil line this is going to make a huge difference in the quality of my frames even though we kind of had a few issues to deal with i hope you guys found this interesting and maybe gives you some ideas and suggestions to think about if you're going to build your own jig like this or any other jig that you're going to create thanks a lot for watching we'll see you next time [Applause] ah my shoe is full of sawdust that's gonna be uncomfortable boomerang anyone come on let's go let's go let's go let's go i've been dragged away to finish this and you're just gonna leave it on

Channel: Home Built Workshop

Views: 44,060

Keywords: Home Built Workshop, Jeff Baker, How to Make a Picture Frame Sled, David Picciuto Picture frame sled, picture frame sled, small shop picture frame sled, how to make accurate picture frames, making perfectly square picture frames, 45 degree miter sled for the table saw, table saw miter sled, how to make a miter sled for the table saw, table saw sled, useful jigs for the table saw, how to make better 45 degree miters on the table saw

Id: BK4fhpXCSV8

Length: 18min 33sec (1113 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 14 2021