- So this is my new tapering sled.
I call it the taper maker.
This is another collaborative project
between me and my buddy, Andy Klein.
And I'm gonna show you all the details,
how it works, and then tell you how you can get
all the information to build one.
The sled has one runner on there,
and you don't have to put that on there
if you don't want to,
but it drops right into the miter slot
and then you can make tapers all day long.
Now this fence here, you just loosen it up
and you can move it all the way across the sled.
You can get whatever angle you need to get,
and it's got its limitations,
but it's probably gonna cover most of the angles
you would need to cut with a tapering sled.
Once you have the angle you want,
you just kinda turn these knobs, lock them down.
That's nice and secure.
There's a little catch here at the bottom.
This stop is where the work piece will lock into.
That keeps it from coming back at you.
And basically you just put your work piece
under the hold-downs.
You can loosen it pretty quickly like this.
Make sure you got a couple of stops in place
holding it safely.
Tighten it up.
And I usually use this down position
to go quickly with my finger like that.
Once I'm pretty close, then I can fine tune the adjustment
and keep going until you find something
that holds the work piece nice and secure.
That's a little bit too tight.
Now we got it.
So in that position, we would be safe to make this cut,
although I would certainly wanna be back
up against my stop.
But you could see, even though it is a threaded bolt
in here, it's actually pretty quick to adjust
where you need it to go.
So for the first cut,
let's just do a simple taper on a small work piece here.
I'm just gonna cut a nice angle.
Now, because this is zero clearance,
you see the blade is right up against the sled.
You can pretty much mark your line for your taper
on your work piece, and then just kinda line up the front
and line up the back.
And you know that taper is gonna be exactly
where you need it to be.
Now I'm only gonna get two hold-downs
engaged on this one.
(saw whining)
All right, that looks pretty good.
Now let's try something a little bit higher.
What I found is about 2 1/2 inches is the maximum capacity
that I can get on this thing.
So we'll use this little leg blank here.
Now in this case,
I think I'm only gonna be able
to get one of these hold-downs in contact.
But in reality, that's kind of all you need most times
is one holding it down,
and then as long as you have the stop in place back here,
that's gonna do a lot of the heavy lifting
for keeping this thing nice and safe.
Fence looks good.
Let's tighten that up.
Now, this one's gonna skew the yoke here.
It's gonna go down a lot further on this side
than it is over here,
but that's what you gotta do to get the pressure.
All right, that's not moving.
So I think we're good.
(saw whining)
All right, well, I guess I just found the limit
on the height here.
Obviously, you can't quite get to 2 1/2 on my saw.
Your saw may be different.
But that's the range, at least.
So let's make a second cut on this leg.
Pretending this actually is a tapered leg.
We'll see what that second cut looks like.
(saw whining)
And there you could see tapers on two sides,
and is just a excessively tapered leg now.
Let's try something a little bit longer.
Now this piece I measured at 35 inches.
I think you probably could get away with 36 inches,
but that really is starting to push it.
And that also may depend on your table saw, right?
So this little piece of scrap, 35 inches.
What I'm gonna do is, instead of just doing a taper,
I wanna show you the other feature of this jig,
and that is using it as a straight line rip,
or a jointing jig.
So if we need to put a straight edge on here
and we don't have a jointer,
this is a tool that can help you do that.
So let's get this guy positioned.
So all you gotta do is drop it in place,
get your hold-downs close to where they need to be.
Now I'm gonna move my fence
just so that the edge gets cleaned up.
So I'm gonna have it overhang my sled base by a little bit.
Lock down the fence.
(saw whining)
All right, so it looks like I missed a little bit
at the front here, but you get the idea.
This is nice and straight.
Use the right blade and you actually have a fairly smooth
jointed surface that you can now use for reference
on the fence if you need to make a nice parallel cut.
So it's kinda like a nice bonus feature.
Now, even though we are selling plans and a hardware kit
for this, I'm gonna take it apart
and show you how it goes together
in case you just wanna take a crack at it,
or build something similar.
So let's take the handle off.
Now, the handle just has a barrel nut in there.
That's what goes onto the bolt.
And most of the components of the sled
are actually a layup of half-inch Baltic birch plywood,
and then some solid stock that's milled to the right
thickness to allow the hardware to pass through.
And so the yoke just has a couple of holes in it,
but the same kind of sandwich.
These hold-downs, there's a little,
basically it comes to a point in there,
and that gap is enough to allow these things
to kinda pivot a little bit here and there.
And of course I've added these, these are optional.
That's just some rubberized cork that gives you
a little bit better of a grip.
On each post we've got a couple of washers and a spring.
I will tell you, it took a little bit of time
and experimentation to come up with the right type of spring
that would work in this application,
not be too loose or too tight.
On the ends we just have two nice
little heavy-duty knobs there.
A couple of bolts.
These are just shop-made spacers.
If you wanna make the base out of 3/4 inch stock, you can.
You can forego using the spacers.
But the bolts are long enough to handle a 3/4 inch base
if that's what you want.
Fence comes up like this.
You can see the fence has a couple of slots in there
for the bolts.
We've got a couple of these posts that help guide that yoke
and keep it straight away,
nice piece of hardwood on the back as our stop.
And then the center of it all is this big bolt here
that goes up through the center.
And the underside of the sled,
there's quite a bit going on here.
We've got some slots that go all the way through,
but then also a 1/4-inch deep slot
that's a little bit wider to allow things
like the bolt heads to slide,
and also allow that bolt head to be deep enough
so it doesn't protrude from the bottom of the sled.
And same thing for these side slots.
That's just for a smaller bolt.
And of course, there's a runner here.
You don't have to install that runner, though,
but it's a nice feature if you want it.
Now, if you think you might wanna build one of these
head over to twwsstore.com.
We've got plans as well as a video plan.
It's a nice long video
that goes through every step of the build process.
It'll help you understand it
because you can do a lot of modifications to this thing.
You could change it to suit your needs.
And when you see it go together in video,
it really helps to kinda set the groundwork for you
making whatever modification you might need,
or just building it as-is.
We also have, as part of this, a nice hardware kit.
Check out this fancy schmancy thing.
The kit comes with a paper pattern,
which is what we use to make all the various shapes.
And then of course it has
all the critical pieces of hardware you're gonna need
to put this thing together.
So once again, everything is at twwstore.com,
and look, there are a lot of tapering jigs on the market,
and this is one of them.
Thanks for watching.