I guess I never told you about my hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Not that you should probably want to, anyway. But since you're here, I can bore you with a quick story about how I made one of my dreams come true within my budget. Something I'm doing must be all right.
It's a table saw. Most of those in the search images are robust mid-size, ranging in price from probably AUD$600-3000. (Don't look shocked, there are a few professional cabinetry/carpentry table saws that go higher than even that. It's a case of get what you paid for. If you need a hobbyist/home Maker type saw though, I think I've pretty much nailed the range. Here's a fairly good example of a Pro saw with finger-saving SawStop tech.)
Why A Table Saw?
Didn't I just buy a secondhand Mitre saw?
Well, yes, I did. But it was partly to help me finish the table saw. Mitre saws are great for cutting across a piece of wood at settable repeatable angles, but it's impossible make a long cut with them. You've probably seen Aggressive Arthur's acquisition video, you'll see what I mean if you check it out. The saw is at right angles (and up to 45degrees either side of right angles) to the direction of the wood it's cutting. If you want to cut up the length of a piece of wood to make it thinner, or take long straight cuts through a sheet of plywood or MDF or whatever, that's what a table saw is designed for.
With some table saws you also get (or can make) a sled that lets you 'flip' the wood feed direction and lets you put a length of wood in sideways and make a cross cut without a disaster causing loss of limbs or life...
So - mitre saws are basically crosscut saws and table saws are ripcut saws. "Crosscut" = across the length / grain, "ripcut" = with the length / grain. Sawmill saws are ripsaws, chainsaws are used as crosscut saws.
And now I have a very small very tiny table saw and a mitre saw. In theory I'm now unstoppable. In fact though I'm probably just unstable. Oh wells...
Here's How It Went
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| I'll describe the process to some degree in the next few paragraphs. |
So (1) - I drew it up in Tinkercad and printed a model at one zillionth scale. Just enough to get me motivated enough to progress to (2). Which is where I made the legs, half the frame, and just over half the top of the bench.
Digression 1:
I'm as always limited for funds, but with a couple of reasonably accurate and repeatable tools I can make stuff to sell and also do some repair jobs. So I picked the cheapest pine from Bunnings (now conveniently across the road from us) which was 70x39 MGP10 non-structural pine and a few 150x25 "plinth" boards. These are more crooked than a dog pees but all the wood for two benches will be under $90. And I have a plane and some sanding gear so I can make it smooth.
The choice of timber/lumber/wood was "as cheap as possible" and build everything from it. One day I may have the money to make a bigger stronger straighter work table but for now this will definitely work for me and may be all I need. The size was chosen to fit with a plastic fold-up Stanley workbench I scored from an opp shop ages ago, which also just happens to work with some really old folding tables (glorified saw-horses really) which were all I've ever really used as work surfaces before. So everything is just a bit under a metre tall, 70cm wide, 50cm deep.
I also wanted to make the saw bench able to be converted to a router table and a jigsaw table. So my one expensive piece of wood was a small sheet of plywood. That went in between the planks (where the short plank is laying) in (2). Usually, table saws have 250ish mm blades but I had a small handheld circular saw that I also scored at another opp shop with a 160ish mm blade, it means I can (barely) cut through a 40mm piece of wood once it's mounted under the plywood. There'll be other pieces of plywood with the other machines mounted under them later.
So anyhow - the table would have taken four of the planks plus a narrow strip in the centre but I only used three of them. They're not 150mm anyway, close to 140, and those edges were about the only straight things about them so I scarcely had to plane anything off them. (The pros would have planed those edges almost optically flat and then glued them together. I'm not a pro, I used a sander to knock off the worst bumps and that was basically that, no ceremony, just boards with gaps but this isn't a rocket science bench.)
Turns out that three boards left a 240(ish) mm space and so that became the measurement for the plywood inserts. Also, because the plywood is only about 12mm thick and the planks are (supposedly - more on that later) 25mm thick I had to put some strips in that made the plywood flush with the top. Conveniently, that forms the perfect way to align the inserts as well.
The maximum of a 25mm thickness also means that the circular saw can tilt all the way to a right angle, if it was any thicker the body of the saw wouldn't have allowed it to get to the full right-angle. This was actually just pure luck and not any clever design on my part. That the saw with the plywood insert attached was able to be finessed into the gap - that too was pure fluke. If I'd had to use any other circular saw I probably wouldn't have been able to make things fit.
Now back to those plinth boards and the thickness of them. Most of the top was easy enough to roughly plane, but one corner of one board was a good 2mm thicker and took me ages to plane down. One disadvantage of cheap lumber...
Anyway - back to the picture and item (3) shows the other reason I need a table saw - that hodgepodge of bits is how I got right angles and longer straight cuts. Sometimes. And in any case it turned any job into an exercise.
(4) is what I've ended up with. I'd been worrying about how to make a fence and then I saw an idea where someone made slides either side of the table and attached the fence to them. I knew my woodworking skills weren't up to that kind of dovetail precision but I could find a matching pair of reasonably heavy-duty drawer slides (5) and now (6) a fence that can extend past the end of the table, effectively making the small table do the work of a larger one.
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| A closer look at those sliders. |
Those sliders... When I found them it was just a case of "wow those could be useful some day, and for five bucks I can't really say no to them." And they finally were. Except that the slides in them were end for end wrong way around. Putting them on opposite sides would have left them upside down so the stops had to be removed, slides (ever so carefully because there are ball bearings involved, LOTS of ball bearings) removed and re-inserted the other way around. One of the uprights on each slide had to be cut off - thank FSM for angle grinders - and some scrapwood from some old furniture made the two rails that the fence support is attached to. I have some aluminium rectangular section that will make the actual fence.
There's already a heap more to update such as that ai may be getting a job site saw as well, and some workshop racking, and there's a long materials rack going behind the shed which will also hold the 250W solar panel in the exact right orientation,
The landlord has indicated that I'll get the use of that garage in a week or two so stay tuned for that, in the meanwhile I'll keep posting stuff I'm doing out in the wild as it were, and of course also my recipes and recycling and sustainable / climate posts but it's getting ever closer to my goal of making some inexpensive machines that anyone can use at home for recycling, so fingers crossed! Just a few lines down ther's a little graphic I made, if you click on the newspaper you'll get to my News Stand were you can see all the blogs I'm running and even subscribe to a once-a-week newsletter that'll keep you automatically up to date.
Now here's a video I just found to get you thinking about woodworking if you're not doing it already.
I scared the shit out of myself with a small router I've had for 25 years but not used for about the last 20, and almost got to the point of getting sliced up by it first time I used it a year ago, but since then I've pushed myself to use it over and over and get comfortable with it again.
It'd be nice if you clicked on the newspaper in the graphic above and subscribed to my aforementioned once-a-week newsletter, even nicer if you shared a link to this article or others with your friends or on your social media, and totally boss if you could make a donation to help me keep all that stuff juggling in the air! See you next post!
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