Top 16 Table Saw Upgrades from 50 Years Experience

hi I'm rich and today I want to talk to you about upgrades that you can do to your table saw which most news Woodworkers aren't even aware of now I've got to say back when I started woodworking 50 years ago when I was learning under my dead a lot of these upgrades were things that nobody talked about and some of them didn't even exist I'm not talking about expensive add-ons aftermarket things or or stuff like that I'm talking about things you can do yourself mostly things that you would do either to the SS off or that you could make to use with your saw you know this the table saw is the most versatile and most useful tool in your Workshop if you learn how to maximize its potential and some of these things are going to help you do that now there may be other videos that you've seen talking about this I've looked online and I've seen some other videos by other Woodworkers that talk about things that they've done to their table saw or that they recommend doing to a table saw and by and large what I see is a bunch of expensive Aftermarket accessories on very expensive saws well this isn't a very expensive saw this is the table saw I use every day it's a Evolution Rave 5-s retail price on this is $4.99 but it's been all this year it's been on sale for $379 in a variety of different places so this is what I think about the price point that most nude wood workers are coming in at so this is the saw I'm talking about doing this with or think of it as a contractor's portable saw because that's really what this this is okay and that's what I'm going to be talking about upgrad I'm not going to be take a $1,500 cabinet saw that you know you can't move around your workshop and you're buying $300 or $500 accessories for it that's that what I'm talking about you and I most of us that are new to woodworking or obvious Woodworkers we can't afford that sell this is all going to be things that are affordable and if you have to spend any money it's probably going to be a minimal amount of money okay so let's take a look at these things I got 16 things I've come up with some are more little some are bigger but they're all things you can do yourself to maximize what you can get out of your tibs the first thing you're going to want to do with any table saw after you unbox it and get it on a stand or whatever you need to do to set it up is to replace the blade now your saw probably came with a 24 to carbide tip blade that's typically what they'll come with sometimes they'll be highspeed steel but I haven't seen a saw with a high-speed steel blade in there for years that pretty much all come with carbide tooth blades but that's a cheap carbide too blade now why is it so cheap well manufactur goal is to get that saw out the door and into your hands and Blades can be pretty expensive if you're selling a saw at a price point of $300 to $400 you can't afford to put a $100 blade in there even buying it at wholesale so they'll put a lowcost blade in there and it'll do the job now remember from the manufacturer Viewpoint the purpose of the table saw is ripping that's what is designed for and so they're giving you a blade that's okay for ripping and it probably does a decent job all right but you and I are probably do a lot more than just rip on our table saws nowadays people do all kinds of operations on a table saw and that requires a better blade so this is not the original blade in the saw although I have to say the original blade that came with this particular saw was a pretty decent blade this is a it's a 550 to uh carbide tip blade that I bought for the saw it's a midrange blade it's not a high dollar blade I got it at a reasonable price and I went ahead and put it in it's a thin curve now a lot of blades say are thin curve which means they're less than an eighth of an inch right the old standard is an eighth of an inch is a normal blade this is about instead of 125,000 this is about I think it's like 75,000 okay so it's it's not quite down to a 16th but it's a little over a 16 of an inch of of curve all right what difference does that make one it's going to affect the scale on the the saw but secondly I'm going to waste less material all right but this thinner blade is made with thinner material so it's not as sturdy as a thicker one all right nevertheless it does a pretty good job for me okay why do we want to to upgrade that blade number one we want more teeth on it right no we want more teeth on it because more teeth is going to give us a smoother cut and if especially if we're talking about doing things like cross cutting and mitering that's really going to become an issue or if we're going to try and joint on our table saw it's going to become a big issue so those are the reasons we would want that more teeth on the blade all right if all you're going to do is rip on your blade leave that 24 to one on there or get a better 24 to and put it on there because 24 teeth is pretty much ideal for ripping but the other thing we're looking at is blade run out what I mean by blade run out is how straight that blade is cutting how how straight it is turning because that's an effect how straight it's cutting all right a cheap blade may not be absolutely flat so if you were to turn it with your hand like this and watch it say looking at a reference point like the ring knife here you might see a little bit of wobble in there that may not seem like much but when you try and cut with it it makes a big difference in the results of your cut once you've replaced your Blade the first thing you want to do is run yourself a test cut and this is a test cut I've done on this blade and and one other actually the original blade and and this blade on this saw and what you're doing this for is you want to look at the the cut and you're looking for blade marks you're looking for the teeth tooth marks out there and they'll appear as a bunch of lines that are running parallel at about a oh I'd say a 45 degree angle okay do you have those and how pronounced are they um if they're just barely visible and you really got to look for them that's ideal if they're really obvious what that means is that your shirt isn't absolutely flat your surface actually have some texture to it and that's going to affect your ability to use it say for gloops okay it may affect the the ability of of two parts to made up well and not leave a gap so that's important that's what you're going to be doing that for all right that brings us to the second item you want might want to consider doing your table saw and that is after you replace the blade or as you're replacing the blade you may want to add blade stabilizers this is just a big washer it's 4 in in diameter they come in different sizes four seems to be a pretty standard size but I've seen him ranging anywhere from uh 3 up to six now remember if you go six that's coming way up here somewhere on that blade you're minimizing your depth of cut all right so all right so what is this doing for us well there's already a washer uh right up against your blade that's that's holding it you know so it's it's not wobbling a lot okay well this just expands that capability now this is not off this saw I don't use a blade stabilizer on the saw because don't need it this is actually off my radial arm saw where I do use blade St wi because it's an old saw bearings might be a bit worn and I do see some more wobble in that blade um these are fairly inexpensive we're talking like $10 or $20 for a pair and they do come as a pair you put them on both sides of the blade it adds rigidity to that blade for very little cost and will make a mid-priced sawblade act more like a high dollar saw blade that's the big Advantage so that's an easy UPG up grade that you can do to your saw to improve the quality of the cut specifically how smooth a cut you get off of that saw okay next thing you want to do to any table saw that youve just setting up and you only want to recheck this from time to time is to make sure your fence is parallel to your blade now this is actually very easy to do all you do is you move the fence all the way over until it makes contact with the blade okay and what I'm looking for here is I'm looking to make sure that I have contact between the teeth not the plate of the blade but the teeth on this end and this end both okay if I only have it say on this end then that means that my fence is caned this way if I only have it on this end it's caned this way regardless of which that is this is an easy problem to solve any table saww is going to have two bolts here now they may be socket hit cap screws where you need to use an allen wrench to get to them and they're set down in whatever mine are bolts that stick up you loosen those two up and you can adjust your your fence compared to the slider on the fence okay and you can set that fence so it is absolutely parallel to your blade you need the fence to be parallel the blade you sure don't want to be tapered down and end up with the blade the wood getting pinched between the blade and the fence that could cause kick back if it's the other way you're going to end up with to crook cut either way it's not going to work so you always want to make sure that you set your fence parallel to your blade that's that's the third item that you should do on any saw with the fence parallel to the blade now next thing we want to check is is the fence parallel to the miter gauge slot you'll have two miter gauge slots on the saw one to the right of the blade and the other the left and they will be parallel to each other now the question is are they parallel to the blade that's kind of hard to check but we've already made sure the fence is parallel to the blade so if they're parallel to if those tracks are parallel to the fence they'll also be parallel to the blade and you could just take your your fence and set it alongside your slot here and you can just eyeball it I prefer to take a a piece of 3/4 inch material now my tracks are are 3/4 of an inch wide and that's pretty pretty common push it down in there it should fit snug and then I can bring my fence up alongside that and make sure I've got good contact all the way down the length okay and if I have good contact all the way down the length then I know those two are parallel that tells me also that that track is parallel to my blade okay what if it isn't now it's not going to show it in the owner's menu or probably not going to show it in the owner's menual for your saw but there is a way underneath to loosen up the carriage that holds the motor and the blade and that whole mechanism and shift it a little bit and that's what you're going to have to do you're going have to shift that and straighten it up you probably won't have to do that but you want to check it and make sure so once you've got you've done that and gone back reset your fence and recheck it with the mic now you've got your blade your fence and your your minor slots all in alignment and that's critical for just about any operation you're going to do on this saw okay so now that we know our fence and our blade are parallel next thing we want to concern oursel with is the scale that's on the front edge of the the saw that and it's the scale that the fence rides along and this is how you set your width of cut so these can be off and and it's not unusual for them to be off so how do you make sure it's right well first is you to use a good ruler I I like stainless steel rulers I've got a couple of them here in the shop and I'll take and I'll measure the distance between the fence and the blade but remember when we're talking about the blade here what we're really talking about is the side of the carbide tooth not the plate but the carbide tooth itself that's closer to the fence okay and so like here I've got my gauge here set for 3 in and I should see exactly 3 in here well okay what if it's off all right so let's say I've got to be right here got move it in a little bit oh I'm pushing the wrong thing and I and and that's 3 in and I look here the Mark here is off well that can happen it happens all the time all right there's generally two ways of adjusting it number one your little uh hairline for the verer here is is usually adjusted there's usually a screw and there's a slot you can move it back and forth and you get some movement that way okay that's the easiest way to set it and you want to make it exact and then you want to run a test piece and you want to compare it with your ruler or whatever else you're measuring with and make sure it really is set right right now I recommend all the time that you you actually if you need an accurate cut that you go ahead and still use a steel rule to to set your fence up rather than using this gauge but I'd like this to be working too especially when I'm needing stuff in a hurry now you probably won't find it in the owner's menu but there's usually like two screws or two bolts that are holding this on the underside of the table you can loosen those up and you can shift this back and forth a little bit okay so you want to set this so that if it says 3 in to your ruler here your your ver here is 3 in so this this is your your next upgrade and it's it's an easy one but yet a lot of people never do it they just assume that it's right from the factory don't assume it even if they set it right in the factory it could end up moving in shipment the next possible upgrade I want to talk about for your Sol and auxiliary fence now obviously so your saw comes with a fence and I hope it works great why would you want an auxiliary fence a couple reasons and a couple times when they might be very useful if you look closely at my fence here there's a couple of marks on here from the blade and what happened was I was using a dado stack and I was cutting a rabbit along the edge of a piece of wood and I got my fence too close to the blade and marked my fence um I could have easily prevented that from happening by just having an auxilary fence and what I'm talking about in this in this context is just a piece of wood straight it has to be straight obviously attach the side of my existing fence and and you want to make sure when you attach it you attach it high enough so the blade can go under it it's not going to be in the way of the blade it's not going to be uh in the way of your your work piece okay and what this does for me is that let's say I get right up to beside that that dado stack and it does end up scratching or it's going to scratch those piece of wood which really doesn't matter rather than damaging the fence that's one of the things it does for it now at the same time if you look at this I've got a much longer piece of wood on here as an auxiliary fence than my original fence now that that could be important if you you're using a contractor's portable table saw cuz some of them have some pretty short fences my previous table saw which was a contractor's portable table saw had a rather four small fence and if I was trying to cut something large like ripping down a sheet of eight foot sheet of plywood trying to hold it up against the fence was a joke right it just wasn't there wasn't enough fence there know two guys you could kind of sort of do it but alone forget it well by adding this what I've just done is extend the fence and I could rip that hot sheet of plywood because I've got about three and 1/2 ft of fence here for to hold up against so that's something that an auxor fence can do for you now something else you can do with an auxiliary fence too and my saw actually came with this uh you can but you can buy them if your saw doesn't have one and that's an aluminum Extrusion like this this came as long as where fence this is two holes in my fence here and what that's for is there a te trck here now I can put in regular t-bolts and attach this fence on here now why would I want to do this couple things one is is the same idea of keeping my fence away from the blade another time what that would be really useful is if I wanted to make repetitive Cuts now one of the things you never want to do with a table saw is use the miter gauge and the fence at the same time to make those repetitive Cuts okay if I'm trying to do this and and uh I've got my my fence out there and I'm running this through and it gets crooked what's going to happen is the wood's going to bind up between the blade and the fence and it's going to kick back all right that's dangerous so I want to avoid that but what if I need to be able to do that repetitive sort of an operation this is one of those places an auxor fence comes in handy so I can set the distance between the blade and the auxor fence for whatever that repetitive length I need is but as long as I keep the fence back from where the blade is so that when I'm cutting I'm not using that I'm using it I'm I'm just using the miter gauge I've just used this as a gauge to set that distance okay so that's something else that can be done with an auxiliary fence different types of auxiliary fences now if you don't already have holes in in your fence don't worry about drilling them it's not a big deal your fence is probably just an empty box with one rod that goes from this handle back here to the clamp up there so you should be able to drill through without any problem if you don't want to drill through it you could always go back to using the clamps like I showed you earlier for for the other fence we're using so that's a great upgrade to give you some capability maybe you don't need it or maybe you only need it sometimes but when you do need it having that auxiliary fence can be very useful really simple upgrade you can make to any table saw is to wax the table now one of the things you're fighting against when you're using a table saw is friction okay the friction of the wood up against the tabletop and and the tables are designed to to give you a good surface for that but at adding a little bit of wax to that can make a huge difference okay and you want to use just whatever sort of past wax you can get that comes in a can I won't say there's one that's better than other avoid Furniture polishes because those are not just wax no matter how much they talk about the wax that's in them they are wax mixed with other materials okay and those other chemicals could cause problems like staining your wood so you it's I call this a two rag operation cuz the first first rag is going to apply the wax all right and you want to do it to your whole table I'm just doing this middle section right here right now but typically you would do the entire table making sure you don't miss any spots maybe shine a light on it to make sure you haven't missed any spots and then you use the second rag to remove the excess some people would call this buffing it we're trying to get a shine I guess we could call it buffing it but all we're trying to do is get rid of the excess wax so that wax doesn't end up on our wood easy peasy that's gives me a smoother surface I can feel the difference between the wax part and the unwaxed part here and it's going to make the wood Glide across easier cut down on friction make cutting easier and that's especially point with important with heavy large pieces of wood the next upgrade I want to talk about is essentially increasing the size of your table area and this is especially important with a small table saw and what I'm specifically referring to is you need some sort of an outf table now you notice the way I've got this set up here in my workshop I've got my table saw and an angle and so it doesn't look like there's anything for an Al table but in reality my bench top is my outfeed table for my table saw and it's Just a Touch lower than the table saw so when I'm running long pieces through here the pieces coming off there can the end can catch on the workbench laying on there now if I really need to do it where I'm using running a lot of pieces and I want them to land on there and maybe they're shorter pieces I'll move my table saw it's it's movable so I can do that okay but a lot of people what they'll do is they'll take their table saw especially with a smaller table saw and they'll build it into some sort of a workbench and and generally speaking this is giving them an outfeed table and giving them a table extension generally to the left of their blade um allowing them to handle the larger sheets now my table size a built-in table extension this slides over it also has one on this side um so I really don't need that but I still need the outfeed capability and like I said I use my my workbench for that the other thing I use is I use the table of my radi alarm saw as a staging area for material coming in if I'm doing a bunch of cuts I'll stack the material on my radial alarm saw now I can come off of it and to my table likewise if I'm doing a bunch of cuts on the radial alarm saw I can stack the material here on my table saw and take pieces from there to the radio arm saw and the difference in the table Heights is just right that I can put a 4x4 or a chunk of 4x4 here on my table of my table saw and it acts as an extension for the table for long pieces of wood that works out great for me may not for you okay especially if you don't have things the same equipment I do um but having that extended area really makes a difference especially if you have a smaller saw another modification or addition you can make to your table saw that really can be helpful is dust collection one might cost a little more because dust collection systems in and of themselves are very expensive now my saw came with dust collection capability built in there's a port on the back and the blade itself is shrouded so the dust down there comes out that port and then the blade guard and has a hose attached to it so it can suck up dust from the top side here however most of the time I've got the blade guard off because of the types of cuts I'm I'm doing so this top part really doesn't do me any good in fact it lessens the capability of the bottom part because some of the suction is still coming through that hose now I don't have a real dust collection system here in my workshop I don't have the room for one first of all okay so what I do is I use my shop back and my shop back is the same it's a small shop back it's the same size hose here and that connects to the port in the back and so that gives me dust collection capability now there you know if you're going to do woodworking you're going to create sawdust that's just part of the game but the more of that we can collect through a dust collection system of some sort even if it's Mak shift the less we're going to have to spend time we're going have to spend cleaning and I don't spend anywhere near the time cleaning in this Workshop that I need to so dust collection is useful can we do dust collection on the top side with out a blade guard in place well actually you can all right most of these that are built to go with the the BL the blade guard mount to the ring knife of the the saw okay I still leave my ring knife in place regardless of I'm using the the guard there or not but what I've seen some people do is have an arm that comes across with a big Hood um that's high enough to so that it's not in the way of whatever you're cutting and and provides collection dust collection on top is it perfect no those are usually though hooked up to a full-blown dust collection system where you're getting a lot more suction than what I can get out of my little five gallon shop back all taable saws have some sort of a throw plate in them but there's two problems with these Thro plates one is that they're not zero clearance there's a lot of space here and they do that because people use different blades and use the plates different ways and so they they give you extra space but that allows debris to fall down there like if you cut a sliver off it also allows uh there to be problems with um the splintering because there's nothing backing up the wood so a lot of people make a zero clearance throat plate now I'll talk a minute in a minute about why I made this or how I made this but right now we're on the why the other problem you can have with them is that some throw plates like this one can sit a little below the level of the table now you really don't want sitting above level of the table otherwise every time you run a board up there it's going to hang up on it but if it sits below it can cause problems too let me show you here this is a Crosscut jig and it sits snugly over the fence and I can attach a board here that I'm going to cut a tendon in clamp it on there and as I go through here and I'm cutting that what can happen is when I get to so that the entire fence uh Jig Is Over the the throat plate it tips a little bit this side drops down a little bit and it tips okay so it lessens the accuracy of that cut all right so how do we deal with this we replace this plate the existing plate in this case it's plastic sometimes they're steel with a zero clearance plate now you can sometimes buy them this is one I have made this is at a quarter inch luon plywood and uh I cut it using this as a pattern I cut it to fit and and went ahead and put the finger holes in here on the end I notice I've got two finger holes that's cuz the first time I had this upside down and I put it on the wrong side so I had to put another one in no big deal this slot was actually cut by the blade so I know it's exactly the thickness of the curf of the blade which means that it it'll help cut cut down spurring now the problem with that is that not only do I have a blade to consider but back here I've got a ring knife and I sure don't want to take that off because that's a major safety feature to prevent Kickback so what I had to do is cut the front part of it using the blade literally it was sticking up like this and then I took it off and I marked it and went over to my scroll saw and cut the back part on the scroll saw for the ring neck the other thing I had to do is if you look here it's routed all the way around because the step down here from the surface of my table to this ledge is less than a/ quar inch now how much of a step you have there will depend on your saw okay this is a a a portable contractor saw granted it's a fairly large portable contractor saw but still so it's designed to be lightweight that means the table is cast aluminum and it's not real thick okay they're trying to keep weight down and so it's it's less the table top itself is probably less than a quarter inch maybe about a/ quarter inch thick my step down here is about 100 about a 108,000 or 120,000 roughly an eighth of an inch let's say it well a little more than that so I had to use a rabbiting bit on my router table to wrap it all the way around here and then you can see I added a piece here this is just a catch on this lip back here to help hold it in place and other than that it fits snugly in there and that gives me zero clearance around my saw blade the next several items we're going to talk about here can be called jings andix fixtures for the table saw and there's still upgrades because they're improving the capability of the saw but it's an add-on it's something you're going to make to add on and use with your saw to make it more effective being homemade we're not talking about a lot of money here we're talking very low cost okay but by having these you're going be doing th things on the saw easily that would otherwise be very difficult to do accurately the miter gauges that come with table saws even good table saws are really really pretty much garbage I mean as far as accuracy is concerned this that came with Mind Table Saw is actually a fairly decent one but still it doesn't have the accuracy that you need what a lot of Woodworkers do to take care of that is to make themselves a Crosscut sled I'm going to show you how to make a fairly simple Crosscut sled this is one of my own design and it's really not that much different than what other people do uh it's not real big but then again my table saw is not real big okay and it's not real fancy now some people make much fancier ones so we start off with a couple of rails and this is pretty easy if you got 3/4 inch wide rail slots for your miter miter gauges uh you just need to cut off a a strip of wood 3in wood regular you know one by something I usually cut mine at a stand a little proud now a lot of people will cut them short and they'll put spacers under them to put him onto the uh onto the the sled I make mine a little proud because that way the only friction I've got is the friction of my rails going through the slots not the friction of the whole table makes it slide easier okay and I'll wax those to make it slide even easier so I've got my fence set where I I want the right Edge to be and like I said this is fairly small it's only going to go from there to there 24 in it's going to be 18 in deep I've cut my rails a little long and the only reason for that is to make it easier to spot where the rails go into the slots when I'm putting it on okay that does no other function besides that I already know that my fence is parallel to my blade so if I make my sled parallel to the fence it'll be parallel to the blade so I'm going to put some super glue on these rails and the reason I'm using super glue for this as opposed to wood glue is that I want it to set up quickly now the critical thing about this whole thing is making sure that my fence on here ends up perpendicular to the blade so I'm going to start off making sure this ends up perpendicular to the blade I'm going to do that by butting it up against my my fence as I drop it down onto my rails and the back edge of my rails are in line up exactly with the back edge of the board I'm using for the Bas and like I already told you I've got a little sticking out here and that's just for the purpose of helping align it when I set it on me okay so in addition to gluing that in place I'm going to put a few screws in gives me a little more added security these are three 4 in screws I've got a/ in thick piece of plywood and/ inch thick rails so there no way they're coming out the bottom end and that's important of course I have to be able to I have to be careful to drill my holes so they don't come out the bottom end either all right I'm going go ahead and put one more set of screws in the middle just to make sure I've got good contact all the way because the screws in addition to other things are acting as clamps to uh hold the ctes together and I'm using my Square here just for alignment to make sure I don't miss where they're supposed to go I want to make sure all those screw heads are below flush okay and this slide smoothly okay now next thing I want to do is put The Back Fence on again on a super glue it in place and again I need to make sure that it is perpendicular to my blade so I'm going to use my Square here setting it up against the fence and I don't care so much if this Edge is lined up with my plywood Edge remember I can tell you right now it's not because somehow or other I slipped on my Plywood And it is not squared in my fence okay but that doesn't matter just as long as this ends up squared in my fence now it's already cut to length so I'm going to set it in here okay again I'm going to Super Glue this double- checking that my square is flush up against my fence and my board is flush up against the square and we're just going to let this sit here for a minute and let the the glue cure I've got the heading at a secondary fence on the back side here this one is parallel to the board now remember my board is not parallel or perpendicular to my fence like I intended it to be this doesn't matter the only purpose this has is to keep my fence from falling apart because I would be cutting through the fence and if I don't have this here there's nothing to hold this end of the fence to the sled together okay so now that I've got those in both in place I'm going to go ahead and flip it over the glue has had time to dry I'm go ahead and put some screws in from the bottom side here to make sure that this is strong I used 3/4 inch screws before I'm now using an inch and a qu inch long screws CU I don't have to worry them com about them coming out at the bottom and hitting the table although I'm still driving in FLH before flipping it over I'm going to go ahead and wax my rails this is just a block of be wax now if you don't have beeswax you can just use a a old candle stub to do it it'll do the same thing I like using be beeswax because it last really well and now it slides really smooth so only one more thing I'm going to do to my sled here and that's to add a piece of plexiglass across the top now most people don't do this this is a although I'm not the first one to ever do it I've seen others do this as well this is a safety idea here my wife is always after me about safety she was a s safety manager in a factory once and she has never outlived it so she's always asking me about safety but she's right in the sense that table saws are fairly dangerous tools I mean more accidents happen with table saws than any other power tool and more serious accidents happen with tbls so obviously when I'm using this sled there's no way I can use the blade guard and so what this what I'm doing here is creating my own blade guard I'll be careful driving the screws in I just cracked the plexiglass down at that end it'll still work work but eventually that'll that may cause some problems but with this with this piece of plexiglass on here it's pretty hard for my hands to accidentally get to the blade or anywhere near the Blade's path and that's what I'm trying to do is protect my hand I'll be holding it over here there's no reason why I'll be holding it here be holding it where my hands are out of the way of the blade and uh that you know that eliminates the need to put some sort of other handle there and it's it's pretty safe my hands won't get get in here now what if I need to to clamp something in there well I can still clamp it because I'll be doing that back away from the blade um some guys do a lot of fancy stuff they'll put rails on here they'll put stuff to hold um uh stop blocks if I want to put a stop block on here what I usually do is just put a block of wood and clamp it with a an F A small F clamp so there's one last step in this process and that's we got to make a cut one of the nice things about this besides they giving us a really good miter is that we have a really clean zero clearance uh space for the blade to come through so it helps us to make much much cleaner Cuts so that splintering and there we have it it's all ready to use once you've made a Crosscut sled you may want to also consider making a miter sled now like the cross cut sled this is really very similar okay the base part of it is made pretty much the same way the real difference is instead of having a back fence that we know is perpendicular to the blade we have a triangular piece that is I guess we could say catac corner to the blade the blade is coming exactly right in the middle of a 90° corner now obviously for this to do any good we need it to have a 90d corner all right how do you get that 90° Corner the easiest way I know to get a 90 decree corner is to cut the corner off of a sheet of plywood now I'm talking about a full sheet of plywood not one that you've already cut cut that corner off at 45° and it will almost invariably be exactly 90° nevertheless check it with a square and make sure it's really 90° in this case I used another piece of wood I had uh rather than using the the uh Corner ma sheet app plywood this this is a piece of a 1x12 and it's mounted on here at exactly 45° how do I know it's exactly 45° I measured it with the square how else okay so I've got 45° between this surface and my fence here and that's really what I'm looking for okay I see new Woodworkers all the time online saying why can't I get my miters to C to come out right people complain about it you know I get I make a frame three of my Corners look pretty good I get to that fourth corner it's way off it's obvious what's going wrong well it really boils down to how well your saw is dialed in this sled minimizes the necessity of having your saw dialed in perfectly because really it's this piece of wood it's this 90° angle that you're counting on and you know some if this 90° angle as long as it's 90° if it's mounted a little off it's still going to work here's a frame I made using this particular miter sled and this is like 22 by 28 and all four of my Corners are absolutely perfect okay so I know it works why here's the thing when you're doing this you cut one piece of wood coming in this way and the other piece of wood coming this way for each Corner as long as you get as long as we know that this is exactly 90 degrees and I know that I cut one on the piece on this side one piece on this side those two pieces go together they're can to give me exactly 90° that's what we're after okay so the key is making sure this piece is exactly 90° ideally we want it at that perfect 45° set okay but if it ends up being a little bit off it will still work as long as one piece is cut on this side and one piece is cut on this side why because the sum of those two sides if this is in in instead 90 or instead of each being 45 degrees if this is 44 and this is 46 it still adds up to 90 if this is 43 and this is 47 it still adds up to 90 so no matter what I do I still end up with a perfect mitor so this is very worthwhile to make even if you only make frames once in a while the next jig I want to talk about is a tapering jig and this is something you use say if you want to make tapered legs for tape okay but there are other places you may want to taper a piece of wood for some reason uh for a particular design so uh there's a lot of different ways you can make a tapering jig this is a very very simple tapering jig uh there are much better designs out there than this but I made a simple one for demonstration okay now what this is again like the like the sleds I've got a rail here that's going into my miter gaug slot okay I've added here a piece of um polyethylene tape and I've done that for friction and also for leveling and I've created a clamp system where I've just got a bar here with some threaded inserts and I've got a couple of clamps that are with with threaded knobs now you can go fancier this you can I if I the next stage of this I would do is I would make this piece this top piece wider or maybe add another piece here and I'd make these clamps curved so that I could have it say riding on here and and the pressure being pulled down from the middle and applying pressure there like I said this is really really simplified okay the other thing that's really important is when you make one of these regardless of the type of tapering jig you make you want to make it a little too wide and then you want to cut it to size on the table saw and what you're doing by doing that is you're making this edge here the edge of your cut that helps you a lot when you're trying to set up a piece to be cut with the tapering Jing so let's pretend this is a leg for something a table okay or a piece of a leg maybe I'm going to make a leg that's a a 90° out of two pieces all right if I want to set this up on here I would mark my dimensions on both ends and set it on the jig and align those marks with the edge of the board that that's why I want that edge to be right at where my cut line is okay so now I can I can put put my my leg in place and and clamp it down this is why I said those curv sort of clamps there they make metal ones that are really nice uh I've been meaning to cut a couple of out of wood which will do the same thing but a lot cheaper here we go so that's clamped in place now I can run that through the saw and I'm going to up with a perfect tapered cut if I plant it right I could get two pieces out of one piece of wood by just you know flipping and using the other side so this is a really simple sort of it's not something you're going to use a lot because how often do you cut a taper and unless you're making a lot of furniture where you're doing a lot of tapered legs this is probably not something you're going to use a lot but if you're making mid-century modern furniture for example there's a lot of tapered legs in that type of furniture so this could be a very useful jig now there are fancier ones and there's a there's a design that's been going around lately that I absolutely love and I just haven't made one for myself because they require the use of what's known as a dovetail clamp and what a dovetail clamp is is it's like an F clamp except for the bar down here is the cross-section of it is dovetailed so the the the sled is made with grooves going in both directions that'll accept those dovetail okay and then so you slide it in and and that's under and then our board is in here and you just screw it down and clamp it so why don't I have a setup like that because I'm cheap I'm too cheap to buy the clamps okay those F those dovetail clamps are not cheap uh that's the only reason I don't have it so but one of these days I will probably do that and and I I'll make a sled instead of being this wide is wider and has got uh dovetails cut in both directions so I can put pretty much anything on there clamp it in place and cut my my angle another very useful jig to expand the capability of table saw is the 10 ining jig this is for cutting 10ins the 10in part of a mortise and ten joint sorry as far as I know there's no way of cutting a mortise on the table saw okay so here's a tenin that was cut using this jig on this table saw okay I've removed all the material out around I've got a nice 10in sitting right there in the middle M all right so how in the world does this work well there's there's two basic parts of this the first is what I'll call a saddle which is this U shape right here that's designed to fit snugly over my table sawce fence but not so snug it binds up all right you want it as tight as you can get it without it binding up so you need the capability of being able to slide smoothly otherwise you're have a hard time using it all right attach to that or as an extension to that I've got this piece of plywood coming up and this piece now this is absolutely perpendicular to the table and this is absolutely perpendicular in the other direction so I have a a perfect perpendicular corner all right what does that do for me well I want to make a tendon in the end of this piece of wood I can take it and clamp it on here yeah I got my clamp backwards you got to do the clamp the right way it's not going to do any good there we go and so now that's holding the the piece of wood in place and I can set my saw I'm cheating you do this with measurements you don't do it by like this okay you do it with measurements so that I'm cutting one side or the other of that tenant so so normally I would cut the outside the side away from the fence I'll set the height using a height gauge so it's the exact height I need that's obviously too high right now and I'll set this distance so it's cutting the the off the shoulder on this side of the tenant okay I don't want to do that narrow side and get pinched in there and and so that allows me to to make that cut I I don't have it said exactly right to make that cut still don't have it set right anyway you get the idea make that cut and then I can flip the board around and make the same cut on the other side but that's not the only thing it's useful for there are other reasons you may want to hold a board vertical like this to be able to make sort of a cutting maybe you want to cut make a 45 degree cutting in some sort there's various variations on this jig that you can do another thing that can be considered a variation in this jig because it's using the same saddle sort of a setup where the vertical piece is a um for doing spline Keys cutting a a 90° corner like say a box okay or even a picture frame so you can add a spline very very s similar jig it's the same as this except for you would take two pieces of wood rather than this one vertical piece and make a v that 90° to set it down and to clamp it in place and go ahead and cut it so that again we're about improving the capability of the saw and this sort of a jig which is really easy to make makes that very makes gives us the capability of making several different types of cuts for different types of joints very easily on the table table saw instead of having do them by hand another very useful upgrade to your table saw is a featherboard now I don't use featherboards a lot on my table saw and in fact this feather board that I've got here is not for the table saw this is for my router table nevertheless it will show us what we're talking about because it's basically the same thing the real difference is that these t-bolts aren't wide enough for the te track in my saw okay what what does it do for us the idea of the featherboard is to hold a piece of wood snuggly up against the fence now there's a lot of times that that might be useful but it's especially useful when we're trying to do Precision Cuts maybe I I need to make sure maybe it's this side of the blade I need and not this side of the blade I want to make sure I get that thickness very consistent all right we put the the featherboard up there it holds the the wood up against the fence as I make my cut but it doesn't hold it all the way through the cut it it only works Works before the blade you don't want it there as it's going through the blade because of the same problem I talked about earlier of the miter gauge and the fence together we're setting up so they can bind up and we'll end up with problems okay Kickback specifically as it goes through we're going to hit a point where the feather the board is no longer in contact with the feather board but by then we've gone most of the way through the cut and the last little bit we get should come out clean anyway so featherboards are extremely useful now you can make your own featherboards I think I paid like 25 bucks or so for this pair of featherboards with the hardware and there are two of them in the package um but you can make your own featherboard you just cut out a piece of wood uh make a bunch of slots in there on the band sawce so that there's a little bit of flexib you don't need a lot of flexibility just enough flexibility actually so that uh if it's it doesn't bind up on you you and you always want the fingers you don't want the fingers coming 90° in you want them at an angle you know say a 45 Dee angle or something like that so that they can can be pushed aside and then of course you need to buy the t-bolt now that's something you'd have to buy but a featherboard is another way of gaining Precision with the table saw when you want a rip to come out very very accurate as far as the width and you you want to make sure that the piece of wood stays up firmly up against the fence and the featherboard will help you do that the last upgrade I want to talk to you about for your table saw is push blocks and push sticks now your saw probably comes with a push stick something like this and uh actually this is a little better than what I've seen a lot of them I don't like plastic push sticks and the reason I don't like plastic push sticks is that they can shatter and let's say that breaks right in the middle and I've seen this happen with them and you're making a cut and you're coming across your blade and it braks light right there on my hand which was right way back there is all of a sudden right there getting awful close to that blade that's why I don't like plastic push sticks okay uh this particular one because of the the cross placing of the bracing here probably would do a better job of resisting the shattering I don't want to take the chance we're talking about my fingers here okay I use my own and just about every cut I make if my hand is going to get within say four or five inches of that blade I'm not going to let my hand get that close I'm going to use something to push it through I've got three different ones that I've made here this is my most commonly used one um the the handle is and an earth gomic angle so I can hold it it's got some rubber stripping on the bottom this is R rubber weather stripping which helps it grip the board Little Hook in the back end and and that'll push the the board through very nicely it's only uh about a half inch wide so it can get into there even when I'm making some fairly narrow cuts um this is a a larger version of that one kind of shaped like a a Handa and I made this because sometimes when you got longer pieces especially thin ones you'll get some chatter there in the end of that and ends up causing chipping and some bad looking Cuts this gives me allows me to get more pressure on the front edge of that piece of wood while I'm cutting which improves how it goes through the saw um now we're so well again it's at a nice ergonomic angle um fairly com comfortable home work with and I also have the rubber rubber W the stripping on the bottom and finally there's this little fancier thing you've probably seen a lot of people using various types of push blocks uh whether they're plastic ones like this uh or or bigger more complicated ones also usually a plastic this is a a wood one I made that is essentially the idea of having that bigger more complicated push block really useful like if you're going to cut a Groove through a wood uh and you need to get downward pressure on there to make sure it stays in good contact with the table um if you're cutting narrow pieces uh things like that there are times when one of these won't work well well and that'll work a lot better one of the nice things about this particular design is not only do I have my ergonomic handle my hands up away from the blade but to get to my hand it's got to cut through that 3/4 inch piece uh in addition to whatever I'm cutting so my hand got a little more it's not quite armored but my hands got a little more protection there so I always recommend using a push stick or a push block of some sort when you're cutting on your taable saw unless you're doing something like working with a maer sled or a cross cut sled or even a 10 ining jig where your hand is away from the blade anyway and protected if there's any chance of your hand getting anywhere near that blade find something to push that with so your hand's not going to be in there where it can get bit so there we have it there's my 16 different upgrades that any beginner can make to their table saw expanding its capability expanding the accuracy of your cuts and getting more out of your table saw these are all things that you can do yourself none of them require a lot of investment except for maybe building the outfeed extension table big table for your saw Manet okay that one's going to cost a bit you might spend 100 150 bucks on material for that but these aren't things where you're going out and buying some $300 accessory to add to your table saw I've stuck with things you can do yourself hey if you just invested in buying a table saw you probably don't have the tool budget to go out and invest in accessories make your own these are all things I use on a regular basis I've made to go with my table saw it's they're practical they're workable and they're fairly easy so why not make some saw US expand the capability of your table saw so you can do more with it

Channel: Sawinery Woodworking

Views: 42,133

Keywords: table saw, table saw upgrades, woodworking wisdom, woodworking tips, woodworking

Id: i65wu1ZR2WM

Length: 56min 9sec (3369 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 09 2024