I just finished making the rip fence
for my homemade table saw.
Now, for cross-cuts, it's best to use
a cross-cut sled, like on my other homemade table saw,
and that rides in the slot in the table,
and we usually call that the miter slot.
Now, the best tool for cutting a slot like that,
is a router, and that's what I did with my previous saw.
But, I haven't needed a router for this one, so far.
And trying to keep the tools to the minimum,
I'm gonna cut it with a circular saw.
Tear-out is always a major problem.
So, I clamped a piece on here
to prevent blow-out as the teeth come out this way.
And I'm actually gonna try to cut this backwards
so that, hopefully, I won't get any tear-out.
Well, that cut cleaner than I thought it would.
So, now i just have to make a whole series of cuts
to hog out that slot.
The right-most cut of the slot was made with
the saw directly against my guide rail, here.
And then for the left-most cut,
I made the spacer, and that way I can insure
that the outer-most cuts are both
exactly parrallel to this.
Now, I could call this slot done,
but this is particle board and it won't slide very easily,
so I'll widen it a bit to glue some hardwood on either side.
Here's my strips of hardwood, to line the slots with,
and while gluing I'm going to clamp them with
a series of oppossing wedges, like this.
I'm now ready to cut that slot to it's final width.
And I've set my guide so that I cut
about halfway of the rail, on one side, away.
And I made this space, and that spacer is
3/4 of an inch, minus the width of the blade wide,
so that when I put that against here,
and run the saw against that,
that should give the other cut
to make exactly 3/4 of an inch between them.
Well, it's...
too tight for this standard 3/4 inch miter gauge.
So, what I've done is
I've added a few bits of tape to this guide here
and then I'll re-cut the slot.
It took a number of iterations but I now have it
so that a standard miter bar fits in here.
I had to actually add a whole bunch of
layers of tape on here,
to bring the saw over a bit further,
even though I was just short
by a fraction of a millimeter.
And the reason for that is on this cheap
old circular saw,
the saw blade can move side to side a little bit.
So, as I was grazing the edge of this strip of wood,
it would just deflect and I had to bring
the guide over, a little bit further, to compensate.
I just cut the other slot with my router
and that did work much better.
These miter slots actually cut away more than
half the thickness of the material.
So, I added reinforcement on the other side,
where both of the miter slots are.
And, while I was at it, I also added some reinforcement
around the edges, and a little bit here.
And I used my long-reach C-clamps,
to hold down a lot of these things.
If you don't have long-reach C-clamps,
you're just gonna have to drill some holes in there
and screw it on while the glue dries.
And I was thinking, maybe I should just double-up
all the layers of particle board,
and then I had another idea.
You could also make a homemade table saw
using a thick old desktop, like this,
and you have a really large work surface.
And if you do use a thick old desktop,
you just have to cut this indentation a bit deeper,
so you don't lose depth of cut.
And you leave the rest of the mechanism unchanged.
All you have to do is make sure the motor is
a little bit further in, this way,
so that it can protrude further into the table.