G'day, welcome to Downunder Woodworks.
Today just got a quick video showing you
how I made my new crosscut sled.
First I just want to explain that there's a
little bit of footage missing from the beginning of the build because
originally I wasn't going to make a video of this.
I thought to myself there's so many crosscut sled
videos out there that who's gonna want to watch
another one. To be honest I didn't do anything special or different to most
crosscut sleds but then I thought to myself, well where do I draw the line
deciding what my viewers might want to watch and what they might not want to
watch. So I thought stuff it, I'll video it and I'll post it and just let the
numbers speak for themselves. If people want to watch it they will and if not
there's not too much lost.
This build came about because I got myself another
treadmill with a bigger motor for an upgrade to the belt sander. I'll do a
short video about that also. The walking deck of the treadmill was made of
heavy-duty 20 mm MDF with a smooth protective coating which I thought would
be perfect for a decent crosscut sled. Starting with the rear fence, I milled
and edge glued some reclaimed hardwood boards together to give me a height of 130mm.
So this is the point where I started filming the build.
Using a roll of duct tape I traced out this profile to form a nice smooth transition
to trim down the ends of the fence to a lower height than the center or the area
where the blade kerf would be. I ripped the straight cuts on the table saw
and then cut most of the curves with the bandsaw.
I then used the upgraded belt grinder to finish off the shaping.
I wanted to attach the rear fence with glue so that meant taking off
some of the coating on the MDF because the glue wouldn't stick to it.
I used a straight bit in the router with the depth set to about one mm.
A quick sanding and it was ready to fit
With the fence clamped in place I drilled pilot holes into the bottom edge
of the fence through holes I'd already drilled into the sled itself.
I then drilled out the holes in the sled for screw clearance and countersunk them
so the screw heads wouldn't touch the top of the table saw. I might pause here for
a moment to point out that I fitted those two runners there to the underside
of the sled before I started filming the build. I just cut the runners to size,
placed them in the table saw slots with double sided tape on the top and then
placed the sled over them. I then tipped the sled over and added countersunk screws.
OK, back to the build. For the front fence I had this board which was
an old hardwood drawer front. It was very straight and flat so was perfect.
This board was 200 mm high so I cut off 50 mm and I was going to
laminate that smaller piece to the larger piece to give me a wider bottom
edge to fix to the sled. A few light passes through the thicknesser made
easy work of removing the old paint.
I wanted the same profile on the two fences so I traced the rear one onto the
front fence and cut it out the same way so there's no need to show that again
but I reckon we should have another look at me using the belt grinder.
I'll have a link to that build video at the end of this video and in the description below.
Here I'm laminating that narrower strip to the higher fence board to give me
that wider bottom edge.
Now always check which nails you have in your nail gun
because this can happen.
At least I got a good failed glue up post for my
Instagram out of it.
I thought about leaving them and just grinding down the
nails but because it was the inside face of the fence I decided to pull it apart
and do it again. With that repair done I knocked off all the sharp corners with
the trim router
and finished it off with my favourite beeswax polish.
It's ok, I have plenty more.
Before fixing the front fence in place I ran the kerf cut through the sled
finishing just short of the front edge, reason being I didn't want to separate
the base completely without the front fence fixed in place.
I screwed the fence to the sled with one screw only at the right hand end so I
could use that as a pivot point to square up the fence to the kerf cut
using my carpenter's square before putting in the rest of the screws.
I confirmed the square was actually square by placing it against a known straight edge
and drawing a line. I then flipped the square over and checked it against the
line I just drew. The results were spot-on.
These photos show the line near
the corner of the square and here at the end of the square.
Now that I had the
fence as close as I could get it to square I put in a second screw at the
other end. I then extended the kerf cut all the way through the sled
and then used Colin Knecht's three cut method to fine tune the fence to 90 degrees.
The fence only needed the tiniest adjustment and it was perfect.
I'll leave a link to
Colin's video below rather than me explaining the process here.
Once I was happy with the alignment of the fence I installed another three
screws bringing the total to five
and that's one very solid crosscut sled done.
Well I've gotta say I'm really happy with the new sled. I've wanted to build
myself a new one for quite a while now. You may or may not have noticed in my
videos that I don't use a crosscut sled very often and the only reason being, I
do have one, it's just not very good so I choose not to use it. With this new one,
hopefully you'll see it a lot more. Thanks for watching along, I hope you
enjoyed the video. I do appreciate the time and support you guys give in
watching my videos so for that, thank you very much. If you want to know what I'm
up to in between videos you can follow me on Instagram but until the next one
you guys all have a great day.