STOP Making Out-Dated Table Saw Sleds, Do This Instead

well today I think I'm finally going to solve my issues with cross-cutting on the table saw let me tell you what I've done so many years ago I made this cross-cut sled for cross cutting of course on the table saw and I made this enormous overbuilt sled this thing weighs almost 26 pounds and if you have to use it a lot you actually have to take a vacation halfway through because it's so heavy and so rigid pushing it through the saw it it just wears you out plus it weighs so much packing it around so the other thing of course by table saw came with this horrible miter gauge which had a black knob on here and once when it fell on the floor it broke so I had to put a wing nut on it you have to reset this thing every time you use it these things are just terrible I ended up going out and replacing it with an anger now this was a major upgrade very versatile really good miter gauge but you know what it's still a miter gauge I'm not in love with the front of this when you're putting wide boards on it's hard to hold them so I end up making this little cross cut sled as a prototype oh I think three or four years ago and you know what this thing worked great I love this thing it's light it uses a plastic runner on there and it it's so handy and small at the end of this video I'm going to show you why this is so versatile and why I love this over a huge sled and as far as I'm concerned this will probably become scrap wood at the end of this build because many of you have told me over the last two three years why do you make a permanent one well today I'm going to do that let me show you what I've got planned here okay so here's the the Prototype I use construction grade plywood as I've said but I did use plastic runners on there I use prop plastic runners a lot on my table saw I just go to my local plastic store and buy this white plastic and cut my own and you know it's a little bit flexible like that and that's actually good because when you install these sometimes they're straight but sometimes there's just a little bit of of movement in them and what that means is when you put them in they they fit in fine but there's no slop in them it's sort of an automatic way of keeping them but you need to make sure that they're nice and tight in your miter slots so those work great I never ever recommend using wood Runners I know lots of people do that but the problem with wood is it expands and contracts and sometimes you'll put a piece of wood in like this it won't fit in the slot because the wood is expanded or it gets sloppy so do yourself a favor and use plastic runners now what happened recently um a few of you have said to time to upgrade Colin so today's the day but what I discovered I've taken this three times I've put this in the metal recycling junkyard but what I've discovered is that this has ball bearings on here so it's actually a really good bar it stays nice and tight and flush of course it's metal the only problem is it has a pin in here that's pushed in it's a pressure fit and I don't know if I can get it out easily without bending the rod so I'm going to try that if I can do that I'm going to use this bar and then I'll just have to drill some holes and countersink them and I can use that for a runner on this the other thing the back of this sled is just a single piece I think it's about a half inch and you can see it's just a single piece of wood what I've done this time I've actually laminated a couple of pieces of Beach and this was straight and flat when I laminated I've now run it through the jointer it's absolutely perfect and flat and the reason that we use laminated wood like this is this wood will stay flat and straight its entire life it won't it won't Bend or warp or the chances are almost nil that we'll ever do that I've never had laminated wood that does that so that's the reason that I've used laminated wood so the first thing I need to do is go to another part of the shop and see if I can get this bar off easily and then we can start doing some Drilling and tapping so I'm just going to go ahead now and drill these three holes and then I'll countersink them of course we want to lubricate this so that we make sure that we don't overheat the drill bit okay and the nice thing with this setup is they don't have to rearrange anything because my countersinking bit now is already centered this way I just have to center it it's centered this way I just have to center it this way and that looks like that's right on there so there's the screw that I'm using it's a number eight by three quarters so that should work well let's go ahead and do that all right okay so there's my bar and you can see that I've recessed those screw holes and those are now going to go underneath and what I want to do first of all is to just check to make sure this bar runs free and smooth and it does now remember I'm doing some extra work here because I happen to have a surplus piece of Steel here but don't forget you can do all of this stuff with a easy easily found easily made plastic Runner that will serve you probably the rest of your life so there's my washers placed on there you'll also notice if you can barely see there's a black mark there that is the center of my table saw sort of side to side or end to end and the reason I'm doing that is I want to put this and this happens to be right in the center that screw that I put in there so I'm going to put that in like that now that is just barely above the surface of my the deck of my table so I know what I'm going to do now I'm going to put some double-sided tape on here and then I'm going to drop my Baltic Birch on top of that but watch what I do and how I I go about doing this so hopefully this tape is going to work for me it's pretty thin tape it's pretty sticky but it's very thin and sometimes thin doesn't work that well all right I need to I want to make sure that I when I finish this that I'm going to be able to cut a little bit of this off with my table saw blade which is down below here so right now what I'm going to do is move that over so I could just barely see where the blade is and now when I drop this down on here and make sure there's nothing on here it's nice and clean and same on the back of my plywood when I drop that on there that plate hopefully is going to stick to that so that when I lift this off I'll be able to lift that plate off with that now this is an absolutely critical because you're going to do some cutting later on anyway but let's have a look and see what that looks like now I'm going to slide it off here rather than try and lift it so I don't there we go okay and that's precisely where that wants to go on there okay the first thing I want to do from the back side I want to drive a screw up into my laminated back piece here and of course these screws need to be recessed in here so that when they hit the table they're not going to stop okay and I'm going to redrill part of that so a lot of people will tell you to use the table saw blade you never align anything to the table saw blade and you don't ever align anything to the fence either what we do align this thing up because everything on a table saw is aligned to the miter slot so we're going to align to the miter slots now what I've done is I've made a piece of wood a piece of got a piece of board here and I have very lightly planed it so that it fits because it was a little bit proud but I want it to fit in that slot snugly like that and it doesn't matter if there's a tiny bit of Wiggle what matters is that it's seated and that it's firm in there and you can see that this one is because now what I want to do is align that to that board like that and I actually have a little cut off here just to be you don't have to do this part but I like to do that and now we're going to align the back with this square and it's almost there now then we'll check it then we'll nail it down and we'll put the screws into it but that looks like that's firm there now I'm just going to clamp that to save us a bit of time today I have set the fence according to my square and you'll notice the clamp down here I had clamped this end and checked it and it was square and what I've done now is I flipped it over and I've put three screws in now totally into the back so now that it's finished and square now we want to do a final check of that and the way we're going to do that I have this piece of It's actually an MDF board that's perfect this is a factory Edge down here I'm going to make one cut here I'm going to make another cut here and a third cut here and the reason I'm doing that is when I make the first cut here if this is off for example I will put the square right in here and if the square measures if it's let's say it's off by two thousandth of an inch when I turn it around I'm going to do the second cut here and then I'll measure the square here and if that's off 2000 this is also going to be off 2000 the 2000 here plus the new 2000 so that will be now four thousand it will be off here and if I were to make a third cut which I'm going to do then it compounds so it's off if it's off 2000 here it'll be another 2 here so two thousand plus two is four thousand plus two is six thousand so I can compound that and even one last one up here so I could be up as much as let's say for eight thousandth of an inch so what I'm going to do I'm not when I cut these I'm going to there's the factory Edge down there I'm going to cut that and I'm just going to whirl this around and cut each one of these but then in the final I'm only going to measure this and this because that's the compound and whatever that's off that's what how far this cross Cuts jig is going to be off so I'm just going to go ahead and we'll do that okay so there's the final cut the third cut that I made in there is the factory finish so there's the angle that I'm measuring what I want to measure and I actually have some feeler gauges here and I had to put two of the little arms together to measure that and I had to write it down here because I added it up it's .025 of an inch or 0.785 of a millimeter so that's in seven or in four feet so that's one two three that's in four feet it's off 0.025 of an inch so that's pretty good for a home built cross cut jig so just how versatile is this little jig for cross cutting on the table saw it is super handy and I've proven that over the last couple of years first of all my sliding miter will only cut 12 inches so that's as far as my sliding my this one you can move back and even though it it seems like it's unstable back here you can put a wide board on here this actually Cuts wider than my sled and because you could hold this down like that you can push things through smoothly and evenly and get really wide cuts with this I use t-nuts in the other one you just Mount them from underneath and now you've got hold Downs that you can put so you can do all sorts of different angles multiple angles you can do stop cuts by clamping to your fence and doing stop cuts that way you can clamp to the fence of your jig here and do stop cuts that way all all sorts of handy thing what I like about it is there's no restrictions it's wide open all the way around so if you've got boards that are longer or or odd shape you can put them on here either clamp them down or attach them to the fence and get good even safe cutting and get perfect cuts just a handy handy little table saw jig for cross cutting well there we go for all of you including you Bill who have said Colin how come you don't make a permanent one and use some good quality Baltic birch plywood there it is finally done I'm finally happy that it's done too because this is one of my most used jigs I did another one uh some time ago the elephants another one of my most used jigs if you're looking for jigs that you'll use a lot this is one of them I use the L fence a lot I'm coming up in the next little while I'm going to be redoing my squaring jig which is another one that I use a lot so stay tuned for that I'm koala Cadet for woodwork web thanks for watching

Channel: WoodWorkWeb

Views: 1,303,471

Keywords: woodworking, wood work, wood furniture, table saw safety, table saw, table saw sled, table saw jig, table saw accessories, wood work shop, wood shop, beginner woodworking, wood, wood work creators, woodwork creators

Id: 974H9ySCkfc

Length: 16min 32sec (992 seconds)

Published: Thu May 04 2023