crosscut sleds...

[Silvan]

If anyone is having trouble with 90-degree crosscuts and hasn't yet built a crosscut sled, they should get their act together and build one today! :)

I have a really sorry TS that I've been working on trying to wrangle into becoming at least somewhat useful. I made some adjustments, and dramatically improved the quality of my rips, but crosscuts were still absolutely hopeless. I tried making a table-width fence with an auxilliary slider to ride in the opposite miter slot, but it was a marginal improvement at best.

So I just finished carefully building a crosscut sled, making it as perfect as I could. Lo and behold, the damn thing actually worked! I cut several piece in a row that are only the slightest hair off, and I think that hair can be chalked up to not clamping the work. I'm going to build some kind of clamping mechanism into the thing tomorrow, and see if I can get closer to perfection.

Boat anchor hell! I might even end up keeping this thing for a few more years, until I can afford to tear down my termite-infested shop and build one that's large enough to more comfortably accommodate a larger saw.

Is there some source for angle blocks that I could use along with this in order to cut 45s and other common angles? I'd have better luck if I didn't have to manufacture them using this saw, since I'd have to go back to the miter gauge to do it, and that sorry ass miter gauge was definitely a big contributor to all the problems I've had.

[Gfretwell]

I ended up making a crude one to true up my blade/motor. Basically just a piece of plywood with a thin strip of 3/4 maple stock for the track. When I ran it through the first time I had a sled along with a perpendicular surface to compare the saw to. Since then I have used it to cut some smaller pieces that looked like a finger loser and also some long, necessarily straight cuts. I am ready to make a good one, wondering how I have done without all these years.

[Lew Hodgett]

A modified sled using a corner from a sheet of plywood.

Check out Fred Bingham's book, "Practical Yacht Joinery", for details.

Piece of cake.

HTH

[Pat Barber]

A corner cut off from a sheet of plywood or MDF would make a perfect 45 fence. I would even prefer the MDF over the plywood.

This would assume that your fence on the 90 degree sled is exactly

90 degrees.

[Tim Douglass]

OK, maybe I'm just being stupid right now, but last time I checked the corner of a sheet of plywood was a 90 degree angle. You can cut it off at basically any angle, so how do you get an accurate 45 using a 90 degree corner?

Tim Douglass

[Swingman]

Picture worth a thousand words? Take a look at the miter sled on my website, shop fixtures and jigs page ... it illustrates how to use the factory corner from a piece of plywood on a sled to cut 45 degree, or thereabouts, angles.

Cut the corner off the two adjacent factory edges as near to 45 degrees as you can, BUT ... in reality it really doesn't matter if you err slightly, providing you use the cut the sides of your frame in the proper order.

By cutting the corners in the right order, you always insure a 90 degrees for the joint. One angle may be 47 and the other 43, but they will always make a perfect miter of 90 degrees.

Think about it for a minute, and it will dawn on you how it works.

[Tim Douglass]

OK, I see that. I was thinking of trying to get a perfect 45. After further thought, you can get awfully close just by measuring exactly the same distance from the corner on each side and cutting there. I'm afraid that geometry is too many years in the past for me to get these things quickly.

Tim Douglass