Crosscut Sled

This crosscut sled was my second accessory I built for my table saw. I built this last summer from formica covered MDF and oak trim. I spent several hours searching the web for ideas that I wanted to include in my version. For some reason I never stumbled across Lumberjocks at that time. I saw a sled design on ShopNotes that is a starting point, but I made several improvements/changes. I have seen features here that I might add in the future. Let’s see if I can cover the details.

First is the size – it is 27” deep and 45” wide. This is as big as I felt I could handle. In the past year, there have been two times where friends have stopped by to use this sled because of its size.

I spent a lot of time getting the fence perfectly square. It took several clamped setups and test cuts before I was happy. Test cuts were done by squareing a wide board then flipping the board over and cutting a small piece off the end. The cutoff would show me twice the error of the fence. I would then cut four pieces and stack them to get a better estimate of the error.

The sled has two adjustable panels on each side of the blade. This way I can set the floor of the sled next to the blade even when I use a dado or tilted saw blade setup.

Edit
Cal asked for more information about the adjustable panels and runners. It seemed best to add that here rather than down in the comments. Each panel consists of the floor panel and a piece on each end. Each end is held in place with a bolt. That is a total of four bolts. You can see them in the first picture. There are total of 5 black knobs visible the lower right one is for an extension (described below). The remaining 4 knobs secure the adjustable panels. The first picture shows an end board fairly well – it is to the right of the blade guard (described in the next paragraph). The second picture shows another end piece well – on the back side and for the other adjustable panel. Hope that is clear ;)
The runners are hard maple. I used two of them. They were cut slightly (0.004”) large and fitted by sanding down.

End Edit

The box on the front of the sled completely covers the saw blade. This only works when used with my outfeed table . The stopped slots on the outfeed table stop the travel of the sled before it can pass through the blade cover (and then my hand). This is by far my favorite feature and one I highly recommend.

There are two adjustable miter fences – one right hand and one left hand. They rotate around a pivot point that is centered on the arc routed with a t-slot bit. Getting the pivot point and the arc concentric took some thinking but I figured it out!

There is an extension for cutting large panels. It locks into place with a single bolt.

Finally, there is a t-slot rail that runs the full length of the sled and the extension to let me lock down a stop block (which I have not yet built).

I find myself using this sled all the time.

-- Steve - Impatience is Expensive