I have a problem this cross-cut sled is way too small and this cross-cut sled is way too heavy so I'm going to make a new sled that'll have a big capacity but be super light and I'll show you my way simpler version of the five cut method that's so easy a third grader can do it I'm starting with a leftover sheet of three quarter inch Baltic birch plywood left over from the Glory Days of when you could actually get Baltic Birch you definitely don't have to use Baltic birch plywood for a Crosscut sled but you want to make sure to get something high quality so that it remains flat and stable over time I'm going to glue these two fence pieces together to make a more thicker and more stable fence I'm going to also make it straight by clamping it to a level and if you don't think this level is straight enough for woodworking then you should probably be a machinist or something because woodworking is not that straight [Music] now I am admittedly lazy and I don't really care for lifting heavy things if I don't have to this is what prompted me to make my small and mighty cross-cut sled in the first place and I love it I mean I use it all the time because it's so much easier to grab throw my table saw for a quick small cut but it doesn't cover everything about five percent of the time I still need to cross cut something wide like when I made my workbench those panels were super deep so I had to use my old cross cut sled but I absolutely hate that one I built it six or seven years ago and the YouTubers told me to make it super massive I genuinely don't understand why it's better to have one massive sled so that I can try and cut everything rather than having a few smaller sleds that are purpose-built for specific tasks and yeah a larger sled might take up less space but like my shop is about as small as it gets and it's just not a big deal to me in order to make the sled a little lighter I'm going to cut off the front left corner where it doesn't really need to be there the work piece will be supported more from the fence side and the front of the table saw so arbitrarily I just drew a line right about here and I'm just going to remove this it'll also maybe make it slightly less Tippy on the left side where the edge is slightly hanging over the side I could also drill a bunch of large holes in the base to lighten it up even more but that just seems like a lot of work and it's going to be light enough to prevent me from complaining about it but I do have to drill a few holes for a very specific reason and here's why I do not like making wooden Runners for the miter bars I'll reiterate what I said in the last video they swell up in the summertime when it's humid here so then I have to sand them down so that they run correctly and then by the time winter rolls around they dry out again and then the whole thing is just too loose boom aluminum Runners you can adjust them with an allen key to take up the slop but in the nine months of using the other sled I think I adjusted them maybe once and I think that was because I dropped the sled I'll leave a link to this one that I used for this sled down in the description so these adjustment screws have to be facing up and is why I need to drill a few holes in the base so I can access them I didn't even realize this until after using that sled for a while but having the adjustment screws on the top makes it super easy in comparison to some others like this Craig miter bar on this one because the adjustment screws are on the side of the miter bar you have to remove it when you want to adjust it then place it back to check if you're good or not so essentially you're just like guessing and checking have having the adjustment screws on the top allows you to adjust it and immediately know if you're good or not [Music] all right let's have a look at this fence because I'm guessing it's dry now flies and pancake so I made this oversized in the beginning so I can cut it down now after I glued it up [Music] how pretty that is the inspiration for this style of sled came from Good Old Norm from the new Yankee Workshop he used this panel style sled for pretty much everything and what really gravitated me towards it was how big of a capacity it has relative to how small and lightweight it is also because the fence is on the far side of the work piece it doesn't tend to tip back as much when you cross cut wider boards before I assemble this let's give everything a quick round over to make it less of a hazard because I know myself and I will cut myself on this here's a hot little tip for you I find it's very easy to get a frayed Edge when doing a round over on plywood but to prevent that I do a climb cut all a climb cut is is going in the opposite direction where you should be going typically a climb cut will run away on you if you take a big bite by using a round of a bit that's an eighth inch or less it's pretty easy to keep control over it sawdust can accumulate on your cross-cut sled base and what can happen is that you place your work piece up against your fence the sawdust has nowhere to go and then your work piece becomes skewed and then your cut won't be 90 degrees so what I did on my previous cost cut sled is put a chamfer underneath the fence right here so when you place your work piece up the sawdust has somewhere to go your work piece can still make contact with the fence foreign [Music] big chunk out I guess I should have did another climb cut there something that I like to do to all my more permanent shop Jigs and fixtures is to finish them but it's completely optional I just think it keeps it a bit cleaner keeps dirt from sticking to it for this I typically will use a water-based acrylic like General Finishes high performance because it's quick to apply dries really fast and it's just easy to use [Music] before I assemble this I just want to hedge a question that I am sure is going to come up in the comments and that is wouldn't it be more stable if you put it on the right side of the blade instead of the left side of the blade and to that I would say yeah so now we're going to mount the miter bar and to do that I'm going to lower the blade below the table bring the fence so it's over the blade but just a little bit of the blade protruding on the left side so side note these miter bars have these washers on the underside to fit into the t-slot I definitely don't want those right now because it's going to prevent me from lifting this out but I'm not even sure if I'm going to put these back in the end well I guess we'll see I have some washers here I'm going to lay these in the bottom of the miter slot in the table saw top so that when I put this miter bar in it's going to stick up just above the surface of the table saw armed with some CA glue I'm just going to put a little dab along the miter bar here with the miter bar flush with the front edge of the table saw I'm also going to lay the base flush with the front edge of the table saw too and
