Shop Note

Making and using a "Saw Sled"

John O. Kopf

Whenever you need to repetitive sawing on your modeler tablesaw, it's worth building a "Saw Sled" for the purpose.

A saw sled is simply a sliding table guided by the saw's existing miter slot.

All you need is a strip of hardwood that fits in the miter slot, a piece of plywood of appropriate size, and perhaps a few other pieces of wood to install as fences and braces. If you are not going to saw material on top of the sled, any thickness of plywood can be used; otherwise, you'll want to use thin stock (say, 1/16th inch) so you can still use most of the saw's cutting depth. Such plywood is usually available in the hobby shop, in the model airplane section.

The picture below show a Preac™ saw and four special-purpose sleds:

Preac™ Saw along with 4 sleds

Sled 1: used to make 45 degree miters;
Sled 2: I needed a lot of veneer wedges to make a "sunburst" pattern;
Sled 3: Used to make gratings;
Sled 4: Used to cut strips square. Use of blocks cut to specific angles makes it into a miter box.

Here's a more detailed description of these 4 sleds.

Sled 1:

Used for making miters. This sled is unique because the wood to be cut is held outside the sled. Since there is an occasional need to put miters on long pieces of stock (perhaps for building a case?), the guiding fences are as long as manageable.

In this case, I used a 6" square of 1/4" plywood. Care was taken to make one corner perfectly square. It was then glued onto a strip of wood that was a sliding fit in the saw's miter slot, taking care that each edge was 45° to the blade. After the glue was dry, a 1/8" x 3/4" fence was glued to each edge. Finally, a 1/4" hole was added so it could be hung up when not in use.

"Through"-cut Sleds

This form of sled passes over the blade, causing it to cut a slot through the bottom of the sled. Because of this, each of these sleds MUST have a brace front and back that's thicker than the blade's cutting thickness. If they are to be used as fences, they will have to be set to a specific angle to the blade; otherwise, they can just be slapped on. Their main purpose is to keep the two sides in alignment across the saw cut. I often make them from scraps cut from the edges of 3/4" boards; even pine works here.

Sled 2:

For my model of HMY Caroline, I needed a large number of 3° wedges I could then glue together to form a sunburst pattern for the cabin floors. This sled has a fence set to 3° from the saw-slot, and a small piece of scrap to act as a stop so the veneer didn't hit the brace at the front of the sled. In use, I'd cut a 3 1/2" long slab of veneer, and flip it after each cut so that the grain of each wedge ran lengthwise. The resulting wedges could then be edge-glued onto a piece of waxed paper (so they could be removed again), with all of the wedge points together.

Sled 3:

This sled is used to make gratings. I have a saw blade that is .058" thick (almost 1/16"). I made sure that the front brace was square to the blade, and passed the sled over the blade to form a slot. I also cut a piece of wood .058 x 1/32 as a jig, and carefully glued this to the sled about 1/16" to the right of the slot. In use, I take a piece of 1/16" stock, butt it up to this jig, and make a cross-cut (dado) 1/32" deep. I then move the stock so that the dado straddles the jig, and make another cut. This is repeated until the stock has a series of parallel dados, each .058" wide and 1/32" deep, and 1/16" apart. The stock is then ripped into 1/16" square timbers, each with a series of notches. I can then interlock these to form a checkerboard of openings in the grating.

Note - it is a good idea to mark one end of the stock before ripping it into the square timber...that way you can insure that the grating is assembled in the same order that the dados were cut, avoiding possible problems if the individual notches aren't perfectly aligned, pehaps because the spacing was thrown off by sawdust causing misalignment of the slot and jig at some point.

Sled 4.

This is simply a cross-cut sled. Using the miter for cross-cutting, sometimes the cut-off piece drags on the table and the cut is not square. The use of the sled with it's front brace/fence at right angles to the blade eliminates that problem.

If I need to cut a lot of pieces at some specific angle, I simply saw a triangle with that angle from a scrap of 1/4" plywood, and then use that against the fence to guide each piece. The advantage of using triangles - rather than the saw's miter jig - is that the triangle can be flipped back and forth, allowing you to hold the work on either side of the blade as convenient.
{John O. Kopf}

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