Table Saw Crosscut sleds revisted: a small improvement.
So today, I needed to square a piece of plywood. I reached for my trusty TS panel-squaing jig, a la woodgears.ca, but the wood bar was sloppy in the miter slot. Don't ask why-I didn't make it that way. To make matters worse, the bar was set into a groove in the jig, so making another bar was not going to help.
What to do? I suppose I could have made another complete jig, but didn't feel like it. Instead, I tried to create a shop-built adjustable bar.
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Here's the bottom of the sled. Ignore the shiny black stuff; it's just graphite.
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To take up the slack, I removed the bar and inserted 6 flat head screws and adjusted them to fill the slot. It took a while to tweak them, but I managed to make it work.
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Work in progress:
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The screws are not entirely flat, so after I had them adjusted, I used a mill file to even things out:
.
..
With the bar back into the sled…
.
..
Ready to use:
.
..
And, yes, it worked!
I do plan on replacing the steel screws with brass ones as soon as possible.
So today, I needed to square a piece of plywood. I reached for my trusty TS panel-squaing jig, a la woodgears.ca, but the wood bar was sloppy in the miter slot. Don't ask why-I didn't make it that way. To make matters worse, the bar was set into a groove in the jig, so making another bar was not going to help.
What to do? I suppose I could have made another complete jig, but didn't feel like it. Instead, I tried to create a shop-built adjustable bar.
.
..
Here's the bottom of the sled. Ignore the shiny black stuff; it's just graphite.
.
..
To take up the slack, I removed the bar and inserted 6 flat head screws and adjusted them to fill the slot. It took a while to tweak them, but I managed to make it work.
.
..
Work in progress:
.
..
The screws are not entirely flat, so after I had them adjusted, I used a mill file to even things out:
.
..
With the bar back into the sled…
.
..
Ready to use:
.
..
And, yes, it worked!
I do plan on replacing the steel screws with brass ones as soon as possible.