Top 10 Woodworking Table Saw Jigs and Accessories & How To Make Them - According to Me

the single tool that I use most in my work is the table saw well maybe the pencil but I don't really know too many pencil jigs so let's talk about table saws all right so I'm still gonna be using my main saw the saw stop pcs the bulk of the time but you're probably gonna see more and more of this saw in the coming months and years my jobsite saw and while these saws are great right out of the box to get them most of them and really any table saw you're gonna want to build or buy some jigs and accessories probably a combination of the two so while I was making the ones that I use the most for this saw I thought I'd go over my favorites and how to make them so let's get into it first up is the crosscut sled now I'm not gonna be giving dimensions here because it's all relative to your particular table saw but all the basics should apply to pretty much any saw and also I should say that this is kind of a watered down version of the sled that David Pacino built on his channel and he goes over in a lot more detail so I'll throw a link to his video in the description also so you're gonna start by cutting out a large rectangle that's gonna be the base for everything I'd like to make mine as big as I can get away with reasonably and that way I have the most room to work on it when I'm using it in the future next I'm gonna use some hardwood so here I'm using maple to make some runners that'll fit in the miter slots I'll be making a pair one for each slot and I think the best way to do this is err on the side of too big and then just keep removing material until it's just big enough to not have any play but so that they can still slide freely within the miter slot also you're gonna want to make sure that they're just a little bit thinner than your miter slots are deep that way they don't touch the bottom next I'm going to take some pennies and put them in the slots to hold the runners proud of the surface of the table saw and then I can place my base on top of that and with a little glue and some weight hold everything together while it dries a little bit and just to make sure that I'm pretty close to square at this point you can see that I'm referencing my fence on one edge so after the glue is pretty dry I came back and installed some screws through the runners and into the base and actually it's probably better to do this the other way where you're going from the top side so from the base into the runners but this seemed to work for me so I don't know maybe it doesn't make a difference after all all right going back in time a couple minutes while this was setting up I also ripped out a couple of strips of plywood and that's gonna become the back fence of my sled basically the part that the workpiece rests on and that you'll be holding to maneuver the sled so I laminated two pieces together and after they were dry I use the table saw to trim them flush and then put a 45 degree bevel on what will become the front bottom face and this is so that debris doesn't get in the way while you're trying to use it as a reference which could throw off crucial measurements the next step is to attach the fence to the sled so here I'm just using one screw at one corner and then what I'm gonna do is raise my blade through the table to make a line and you can see here I'm making sure to remove my splitter before I do this and actually I guess now's a good time to mention that that's my number two accessory so most table saws should come with a splitter I think it might even be a requirement but even if it is it wasn't always so you could have an older table saw that might not have one and honestly I think it's the single most important safety feature of a saw so if yours doesn't have one there are ways that you can retrofit one in I know that micro jigs make some that you can fit into the throat plate so yeah I mean I'm not gonna go over it in too much detail I'll just say that that's something that you should definitely be aware of and make sure that you have and use one okay back to the slide so now here I'm raising my blade and making a cut through just the table and I don't want to go into my fence yet at this point so now I can use that line that I just cut and asked where to get my fence really really close to perpendicular with the blade in the miter slot so once I feel like I'm I'm gonna clamp it down to hold it and then insert one screw on the opposite end and then I can test it out to see how close to perpendicular it is and while I'm doing that it gives me a chance to mention something else that I think is really important when you're working with a table saw or well really any power tool for that matter and that's being alert and I think one of the best ways to make sure you stay alert is with coffee and one of the best ways to get coffee is with trade coffee so trades mission is to turn coffee drinkers into coffee lovers and I'll be the first to admit that I am NOT an expert when it comes to coffee I really only started drinking it with regularity this year but that's actually one of the coolest and my favorite things about trade coffee when you go to their site you can take a quick 6 question quiz about the flavors you prefer how you plan on making it and so forth and at the end they'll match you up with a coffee that fits your preferences so if you're like me and you're really trying to figure out your taste still this is perfect and honestly even if you already are a coffee lover it's still a really good way to expand your horizons so my perfect match was called ad astra signature blend from PD's which you can see here they described as comforting and rich just like I like my women all right so all joking aside I think they nailed it I've been drinking it for a couple weeks now and I don't know what else to say other than I actually really really like it but that's it I do want to try some others once I finish this bag because well why not but anyhow here's the best news so right now trade is gonna give away the first 100 people who click the link below 50% off of their first order so just click the link in the description and use the code for eyes all right thanks trade coffee okay so back to testing out my sled so somebody can probably explain this better but here what I'm doing is making a cut and then rotating my piece so that the most recently cut edge becomes the reference face on the next cut and by doing that five times I'm basically compounding any discrepancy so that it's magnified now I don't know if I got lucky but when I measured my piece it was pretty much dead on so once you have it to the point where you're happy I could insert a few more screws and block things up and again David's video is gonna get a lot more into the nitty-gritty of this kind of sled and how to adjust things if you're off so if you are gonna build one of these I highly recommend checking out that video again I'll link it below and one last thing to mention attaching another piece to the opposite end of the sled is optional I guess it makes it more rigid I would say but it could get in the way of potential cuts so just decide what's best for you so the awesome thing about this sort of a crosscut sled is that you know that it's out of perfect 90 no need to fuss around with it whenever you get it out and so if you want to quickly cut one piece or several out in the exact same length a crosscut sled is just about the best option but there are a couple of other tools out there that are also on my list that are pretty similar one that you've seen me use a lot on my channel is the Rockler crosscut sled incra makes a similar one as well but I've never used it so I'll talk specifically about this one so the upside to this compared to a jig that you build yourself is one you don't have to build anything and two you can use it to cut a variety of different angles the downside conversely is it'll cost you a little bit more and while it can be as accurate at getting an exact 90 you'll have to verify each time that you make an adjustment so there are positive stops that should pretty much lock it in but you'll still probably want to double check just to make sure and the other tool that's pretty similar that's on my list is a miter gauge so I've tried two different mitre gauges in my time not including the ones that come with your saw and that's one from incra and another one from Craig and both I would say are honestly equally good they're each a little different but the basic advantage is compared with the other two you can cut a lot more angles with increased accuracy and I'd say the downside is they're a little bit slower so basically at the end of the day if you look at the three they would kind of plot out like this in terms of speed versus what I'll call angle versatility and really I personally think that while all three can be used for similar things I like having all three at my disposal and I use each tool pretty frequently like I'd say that in almost every project I build all employ all three types of jigs so it's really not a one or the other kind of situation okay next on my list is a tapering jig and again you can build or buy these personally I've always had good luck with this one from Rockler so I'm gonna highly recommend it but if you want to check out a video on building one Dustin Penner has a really good video that explains it in less words than me Singh linked below but anyway these are really handy for cutting you guessed it tapers so if you're familiar with my other videos you know that I'm big on tapered splayed legs and this jig is such a huge time-saver it really makes me kick myself for waiting like five years to get one so many wasted hours but anyway here's a project that I'm actually working on at the moment and this will let you know why you might or might not need one so in this shot I'm marking out my tapers I want this particular leg to go from 3/4 of an inch at the bottom to two inches at the top next I fit my piece on my jig and adjust it so that the lines that I marked are just barely hanging off the edge which you would have trimmed to your saw right when you get it so basically you know that's where the cuts gonna happen and then you just cut and since everything's locked in you can cut out three or four more of these legs really easily as long as they're already cut to the same length and that's pretty much it it's a one-trick pony I guess but it's a pony that's the star of my show so yeah makes sense to me okay the next jig on my list is one that I don't really know a name for it's kind of like a tenoning jig but I don't use it for making Tenon's so I like to call it a vertical panel carrying jig so first let me show you why it's important for me and what it does and then I'll show you how to build one so you guys know I like angular stuff one of the most angular pieces is this guy bad Larry I'll link them below if you haven't already seen the build video anyway so I use this jig in order to make the trapezoidal cabinet and here's why I need it as you can see all of these corners are mitered or beveled to achieve this joint I set my blade at 37 and 1/2 degrees and cut the two edges and this results in an overall angle that's obtuse at 105 degrees or 15 degrees more than 90 so that's all pretty easy and straightforward but to cut this corner I would have to tilt my blade at 52 and a half degrees the problem is you can't tilt a blade to 52 and a half degrees so the trick is leaving your blade tilted to 37 and 1/2 degrees like it was for those first two cuts and instead make your workpiece run across the blade vertically instead of horizontally or flat on the table and that's why you need this Jake so yeah let's build it we're gonna start by ripping some pieces of 3/4 inch plywood so that they're the exact same height as your fence again I'd recommend airing on the side of taller and then working your way down until it's just right and once you have it locked in you're gonna need a total of two pieces that are this size and you might notice here that I'm making more than two and that's because I'm making multiple jigs but we'll get back to that in a minute here I'm just cross cutting my pieces to length and you can do this before after but generally speaking I like to go anywhere from 3/4 of the length to the full length of my fence and this is pretty variable in reality but it just kind of depends on what you're gonna be using the jig for here I'm sandwiching my fence between the two pieces that I cut in step one and then measuring how wide of a piece I need to cut for the top and then I could cut that piece out and glue and screw it on the next thing to do was attach the flat face of the jig to the carriage so this is the part that your workpiece is gonna end up attaching to and again here just a few screws should do the trick now like I said I made three of these jigs while I was out there and that's because I use these things a lot and so I want to have one dedicated to making splines in mitered like joints that are 90 degrees and then another one four legs that are 15 degrees off of 90 so here I'm setting up for that in this shot and actually here's some footage from some other builds that kind of shows what you'd use something like this for all right so here I'm cutting out some plywood strips and then making a 45-degree cross cut with my miter gauge and then I can attach those to the vertical piece so now you kind of know how they all work but I'm just gonna show a really extreme example of the vertical panel carrying jig here and you can see that this would be a really difficult or dangerous cut to try to make without the jig alright so moving on one of the questions that I get asked most often is how I get clean cuts on the table saw and there's a lot of factors that are gonna go into it but two of the most important in my book and the two that I usually ask people first about are one what kind of blade they're using and two are they using a zero clearance insert plate so four blades there's lots of good ones out there and my personal favorites are forest woodwork or two blades which are kind of on the pricey side but I see it as an investment honestly I have a total of three of them now that I still currently use and I've owned some of them for over seven years and one of the reasons for that is because you can send them back to forest to have them re-- sharpened and fixed up for about 30 bucks but I guess the bottom line is there's plenty of options out there and you should just research and explore those options rather than settling on whatever your saw happen to come with okay so about the zero clearance insert plate if you don't know what that is I'm gonna install a new one in my saw right here and it'll be pretty self-explanatory so as you can see right now it's just a solid plate with no slot for the blade once you have it inserted and balanced and you make sure that your riving knife or splitters removed you clamp it down turn on your saw and slowly raise the blade through it so this is gonna cut a slot that's the exact same size as the blade which means that the underside of your piece that you're cutting is gonna get a lot more support and should have less tear out and I think for most table saws you should be able to buy an insert plate that's already made to fit it exactly but if you needed to you could also make one if it's an option though I'd honestly recommend buying because it's probably gonna get a better fit but so these next two recommendations have more to do with confidence and comfort while working but I think that those are things that go into making you get a good result so they're worth mentioning so number nine is a feather board and what feather boards allow you to do is keep good consistent pressure of your workpiece up against your fence and they can also get places where it would be kind of dangerous to put your hands also they can kind of act as a third hand in situations where you might be cutting a piece that's too big to reach and one of the other things that I use them for a lot is when I run a piece on edge over the table saw for example when I'm cutting rabbits basically it helps the piece from tilting and last but not least and this might seem really obvious is a good push stick now these come in all different shapes and sizes everything from as simple as what probably came with your saw to something like a gripper from micro jigs but honestly my favorite is something like this a push shoe I saw this design somewhere like seven years ago and so I drew up a file in Illustrator and had six of them cut out on a CNC from a local sign shop and these are my favorite they let me keep good pressure on my workpiece they keep my hands up and away from the blade and since they're made out of wood and relatively cheap I don't mind cutting right into them if I need to to help me get more pressure on certain cuts so that's it those are my 10 favorite jigs and accessories for the table saw in no particular order so hopefully you found it useful and if this was your first time in my channel if you got a couple minutes go check out some of my build videos and I thank you in advance all right see in the next one

Channel: Foureyes Furniture

Views: 1,147,093

Keywords: Woodworking, wood working, DIY, Woodworking Jigs, Jigs, Table Saw Jigs, Beginning Woodworking, Cross Cut Sled, Miter Jig, Tapering Jig, Table Saw Tools, Woodworking Tools, Woodworking for Beginners, DIY Jigs, DIY Cross Cut Sled

Id: tf2gaSmNqcg

Length: 16min 57sec (1017 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 07 2018