Riding the crosscut…

I built a crosscut sled to improve on the not so accurate miter fence of my table saw for repeated 90 degree cuts. The original aspiration was to build The Super Sled. Given that I had only block-board, a small piece of melamine finish plywood and no motivation (money) to go buy some clean new pieces of ply, the plan was scaled down to try and first achieve a simpler design and make it even simpler if possible.

This is the final result…

The runners are from a length of Sal I have, the fence is three laminated pieces of 3/4 in plywood with melamine finish and the back support is a thick leftover piece of Beech from when I made a pair of speaker stands.

Performing an accuracy check on the squareness using the 5-cut method gave me an error of about 0.3 mm for a linear 100 cm for the left side of the fence and an error of 2.2 mm for a linear 100 cm for the right side. The difference is because there is a slight warp in the melamine plywood towards the very right edge. I can live with the error as long as i remember not to make cuts longer than 25cm (error of 0.55 mm) using the right side of the fence. I will graduate to a better sled soon but this will do for the time being.

Eager to put the crosscut sled to the test I decided to humor the wife with a simple small shoe rack to fit cozily in corner space behind the main door. I used a piece of recovered block-board shelving to cut equal width wood strips with varying lengths and screw/glue them together.

Here is the SketchUp model and this is what it looks like…

Since this is going to be for rough use and I did not have my sander handy for the time being I have just left it as is, burn marks and all. Now it sits in the corner just barely large enough to hold the shoes and slippers…