Alrighty... I started on my cross cut sled. It's a sheet of 1/2 melamine about 2x3' with two runners.
It slides nice and easy with no wiggle. I'm getting ready to put the front and back cross pieces on and possible a blade guard. I'm also pondering what to do as an adjustable miter gauge, clamps, etc.
So, show me yours. What have you done that works well. What doesn't? What mistakes did you make? All that stuff...
Mine is 1/2" virola ply, 1 1/4 white oak cross pieces and is used almost entirely for trimming/cutting panels. Up to 38" wide by any length panels. I have no blade guard; I have no clamps, don't need them; I use it only for straight cuts so no miter gauge. _____________
The back cross piece is extendible so I can set a stop anywhere up to 48".
The back cross piece has sort of a box to house the blade when it gets there; box has a transparent plastic top. There is also a sizeable, stout oak handle on the back, angled a bit, directly above the cut line to push the sled. ____________
I wish I had made the cutoff side of the sled wider. It is about 4" now which means if the cut off piece is 8" or more wide it flops down when cut off. I'll fix that one of these days...
Many years ago I built a sled that actually had the fence on the front side. It was easier for me to mark the top of the board and line that mark up with the leading fence end where the blade came through.
With the fence in the back your mark needs to be on the nottom front edge of the board and you need to lean over far enough to see the alignmant of the mark with the end of the bed of the sled where the blade came through.
Because I wanted more than a 90 degree cutting sled I bought a left and right version of these sleds about 10 years ago. They still work very very well. You can cut most any angle accurately and make repeated cuts accurately.
I glued a couple 5" disks of 220 sandpaper to the fence to cut down on any lateral slip of the workpiece.
Before I attached the rear fence, I routed a shallow (1/4") recess and screwed in a piece of ply. When it gets worn out, replace it. It's just a replaceable zero clearance plate, but it works extremely well.
I just finished a new sled. Sorry, no pictures yet.
I added a couple of T-slots for clamping. The fence has a T-slot on top for a stop block and sandpaper on the front for when I'm too lazy to use a clamp :-). Also an extension for crosscutting long pieces.
Since I'm starting to do segmented turning, I added a mount for an auxilary fence in front of the main fence. It swings to whatever angle I need for the segments.
And as another poster pointed out, be sure the fence is *square* to the blade.
There was an article in FWW (?) years ago about squaring the fence (it might have been "methods of work" or something simliar).
Once the sled is complete except for the back fence:
Attach the fence on one side with a screw so that it's free to swivel. Then swivel it away from the assembly.
Attach a piece of 1/4" plywood to the left side of the table of the sled, so that it extends an inch or so to the right of the blade. They used screws through the bottom of the table of the sled, upward into the ply.
Run the sled through the balde, and remove the plywood waste.
Use a good framing square, set up against the 1/4 plywood, and align the back fence to the sqaure. Temporarily clamp/attach the back fence, and run the sled through the blade again. Then make the usual test cuts and check for square. Make the micro-asjustments, then finalize the fence attachment and remove the plywood.
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