Miter Saw Station

I just built my brand new sliding sliding miter saw station. Sliding sliding? Yep, that’s right! I added this awesome feature to give you expanded cut capacity for your small workshop. It’ll also save you money because it’s made from 99.9 percent solid wood, with none of that new fandangled expensive plywood.

Plan

This entire build was made from Pine. I bought rough-cut knotty Pine because it was cheap at the lumber yard, but I essentially just milled it down into two-by-fours and one-by-fours because I can get it much straighter than I could get it from the box store. But if you don't have a jointer or a planer, you can always just use construction lumber, or buy pre-milled wood from a proper lumber dealer.

The miter saw station I built consists of two identical cabinets, one on each side of the miter saw. That’s great because that means no thinking about two different cabinets, getting parts mixed up, or making a mistake. You just do the same thing twice.

Dowels

I cut eight identical legs to size, and eight identical stretchers to size, and I joined two pairs of each to make up one side of one cabinet. Because I was making two identical cabinets, I had to make four of these identical sides, which was pretty easy because I just attached them together with some dowels using my favourite dowel jig.

I have a suspicion that there's going to be two types of comments on the dowel jig. The first camp might say: “Dowels? This is just a shop cabinet, you should just glue and screw it together.” And the second camp might say: “Dowels? You should be using more advanced joinery methods like dovetails and mortise and tenons.”

To the first camp: dowels are going to be much stronger than glue and screws, and they're a great way to get introduced to more advanced joinery systems and techniques. To the second camp: these cabinets are going to be screwed right to the wall, so I don't need anything stronger than this.

Each stretcher gets three ⅜” dowels drilled to connect them to the legs. I easily dowelled all the stretchers to the legs, and just like that, had four identical sides for our miter saw station cabinets. There was a big hole in each side that I wanted to fill, because I didn’t want dust and things getting into drawers I was going to make later. So I took more one-by material and simply nailed it to the top and bottom. Dowels connecting legs

I did want to cut a rabbet on the inside of each leg for some future beadboard shiplap slat panelling, to prevent dust coming in. To attach the two sides together, I used two-by material for the front and one-by material for the back.

Pine vs Plywood

Some of you might be wondering why I'm not using any plywood on this build, and there are a few reasons.

First and foremost, I want to present a different option for people. I've seen a lot of miter saw station builds on YouTube, and probably 95% of them are plywood construction. Anything you can make out of plywood, you can make out of real wood. And personally, I like working with real wood over plywood. I find breaking down large sheets of plywood, even with the track saw, kind of laborious. I just don't get much enjoyment from that.

There are certain aspects of this build that plywood might have been a better option for sheer convenience, but I'm sticking it to the plywood man.

Features

To close the sides of the carcasses, I could have done something like make a panel which would be floating in grooves in the sides, but I wanted to use a simpler technique that will yield a nice look and classic result. I was looking through my pile of router bits and found a corner bead one, so I decided to use it to create some sweet beadboard shiplap, which is essentially just a rabbet on each side of the board, but with the addition of a bead detail, which kicks it up a notch.

The great thing about doing shiplap is that it's very easy to install, just glue and nail it together. But there is one thing that we still need to keep in mind, and that's wood movement. Even though these slides aren't glued up into a big panel, they're still going to want to expand and contract. To allow that to happen, I used a couple 1/16” drill bits as spacers to make sure there was a tiny gap between each slot as I nailed them down. I still wanted to use some glue, because in the end glue is stronger than nails. But I just put a little bit on the centre of each slat.

I don't want things rolling underneath the station, and I don't want to clean under there either. So I added a toe kick like you would see with a typical plywood cabinet. I used some one-by material and glued and brad nailed it behind the bottom of the front of the cabinet.

Top

I milled up the material for the top. This is where plywood or MDF sounded pretty good, but I made my choice, so I had to continue on with solid wood.

The nice thing is that you don't have to worry about getting each board perfectly straight. You should be able to squeeze everything together with clamps. After the top is glued up, it's never going to be absolutely perfect. And I know the gut reaction is to grab your sander to try and level out all the deviations between boards in the top, but grabbing a hand plane and simply scrubbing across the grain can very quickly knock down any high spots or any inconsistencies in the seams of the boards, and that leaves far less sanding afterwards.

I didn't want to use a whole bunch of thick pine for this top, but I did want it to look a little beefy. So I glued on a little strip on the front edge to make it look cool.

Strip of wood for the front edge of the top

Sometimes in woodworking, it's the seemingly simple things that always end up being the most tricky. For example, I wanted to make a platform on top of the top that would support a work piece next to the miter saw as you're cutting it, so it doesn't tip on you. All I needed it to have was two sides and the top so there would be an elevated platform above the actual countertop. When glueing it up, trying to get the top and the sides in perfect right angles to each other caught me by surprise, and I had to scramble to find right angle clamps that I had, but had never used, to help me achieve the right angle. I never expected it to take so many clamps on these joints just to get them to close and look tight, and to be at a perfect right angle.

Install

With that drying in the clamps, I was able to install the cabinets to the walls. The easiest way to do this would just be to simply buy some leveling feet. But the way I did it starts by setting up a laser level and hammering in some wedges to make the top of the cabinet meet that laser level perfectly. Then, you take a scribe and trace the geometry of the floor all the way around the cabinet. And using a jigsaw with a high quality clean cut blade, go all the way around, cutting off that line. The floor of my garage was sloped so much that the front of the cabinet was about an inch higher than the back of the cabinet, and to get the cabinet flush at the wall I used some shims behind it to screw the cabinet into the studs without it going out of level.

After my top was dry and sanded, I could install it. I did the drywall in the garage myself, which definitely wasn’t flat, so I had to scribe the top to the wall. Cutting to a scribe line doesn't always have to be done with a jigsaw. If the line doesn't curve too much, I find I get better results with a circular saw freehand.

Because this is a solid wood top, it will expand and contract as the seasons change. So I used figure eight fasteners to make sure it's allowed to do that.

Golden Feature

The essence of this miter saw station is two cabinets on either side, with drawers full of storage on each. There’s going to be a platform so that when on the miter saw, workpieces will be supported so they don’t tip while getting cut.

Here’s the issue with small shops: walls. When I want to cut a long board down to length, ideally I’d be able to slide it left or right to wherever I need to make the cut. But I can’t slide it left or right if one end hits a wall. The obvious thing to do would be to put the miter saw against my long wall, where it would give me the most room left and right. But that happens to be where my jointer is, and I happen to like my jointer more than my miter saw.

This leads me to one of my favourite features of this miter saw station. I installed linear guide bearings to allow me to push the miter saw all the way down to the end of the station, so I can chop off a board close to the end, and I can also slide the saw to the middle of the station so I can cut it near the middle - or anywhere in between for that matter. So instead of the board having to slide left or right, which it couldn't anyways because of the walls, I slide the saw to where I want to cut the board.

I installed a couple of screws in the front rail, and proceeded to mount the bearings onto the platform. I could have used some sort of template to install the bearings, but I just measured very carefully, and everything worked out. I installed the platform to the bearings, and that allowed me to get the perfect placement of the back rail, which I then screwed down to the top.

This solid wood top will expand and contract, so theoretically those rails will also get farther apart and closer together too. This is why the platform is also solid wood, and theoretically it will expand and contract at the same rate as the top. To allow the platform to expand and contract in relation to the miter saw, I used pocket screws and extra washers. At this point, I had no idea how I was going to lock the miter saw in place when making a cut. Miter saw on linear guide bearings

The saw slides beautifully left and right on the linear guide bearings and rails. The only problem was that I needed a way to lock it in place when I’m making an important cut. Without any good ideas at this point, I moved on to something else hoping that I’d eventually think of something.

Now that I knew the final height of the miter saw, it was time to cut the platform height to match. The platform gets screwed to the top from underneath, and because the grain direction of the top and the platform are all the same, they'll expand and contract together at the same rate. In other words, screwing them straight together is totally fine.

Drawer Boxes

I milled down the wood that came from the old miter saw setup, because otherwise it's going in the garbage. And it's easier to make drawers than it is to throw things in the garbage in my city.

For the joinery and all my drawer boxes, I like to do rabbets because they're quick and easy and very strong, as I demonstrated in my last video. You also don't need specialised tools or a dado stack to create them, although I did use a dado stack for speed.

For the drawer bottom joinery, I used my router table to cut grooves around the entire inside perimeter of the box parts. Using the router table for this allowed me to keep the dado stack set up on the table saw to cut the rabbets, and I cut all the drawer parts to length on the miter saw.

Up to this point, I hadn’t been using my miter saw, because the previous setup was so horrible. Now I can really see the benefit of leaving machines set up for a specific purpose, allowing me to jump back and forth and bang out eight drawer boxes in a day.

Because I'm stubborn, I used solid wood for the drawer bottoms… which meant gluing up eight panels for eight drawer bottoms…I didn’t regret the decision to not use plywood at all...

I needed to figure out what the dimension was inside that groove. The best way I know how to do that is to take two little thin sticks that can fit inside the groove. You take one, stick the end inside the left groove, and take the other, and stick it inside the right groove. You hold them together real tight as you take it out, and then you can take a measuring tape and measure it end to end.

I didn’t want to cut the drawer bottom to exactly the same size as that groove because it needs room to expand and contract, so I cut it an eighth inch smaller.

It doesn't matter if you have a drawer bottom made of real wood or plywood, you might have to deal with a bit of a potato chip, but it's not the end of the world. Take an example box side, and slot the groove into the rabbet just at the end. You don't need to do the whole thing. Now, slide the whole thing back to see if it’s hung up anywhere. There was a spot that was pretty tight, and I did not want to deal with that while glueing it up, so I took a bit of sandpaper and eased that little spot. You could also use a shoulder plane, and do a couple of passes. Then take a block plane, and run it over once or twice to give you a little bit of a chamfer. And that'll make it easier to get the rabbet into the groove while glueing it up.

In hindsight, if you want to make drawers like this, I do recommend using plywood, because using solid wood is a little bit excessive unless you're doing some real fine furniture work. But for shop cabinets, plywood is a-okay.

To glue all eight drawer boxes up in a timely manner, I used my brad nailer to hold things in place, but still used clamps to close all the joints nice and tight before sending in a few brad nails in each. This makes sure that the joints look good in the end, and are strong.

Drawer Install

To get all these drawer boxes out of my way, I went right to installing them. I bought some 22 inch full extension soft close drawer slides for this. I used my laser level to align my drawer slides, and that worked out perfectly. The cabinets were already installed with the laser level, so I knew that the cabinets were level.

Laser level for drawer slide installation

I could have put the slides in before I permanently installed the cabinets to the wall, but there's not really a solid reference from the bottom of the cabinet, because the floor is sloped and the front structure doesn't match up with the back structure. So that would have been a little difficult. I installed the part that goes on the drawer box, marking it on the door locks, and screwing it into place.

Mag Switch & T-Track

While I was finishing up installing the drawer boxes, a package arrived containing a mag switch, the idea that one of my Instagram followers gave me to lock the sliding mechanism. The mag switch needed to be recessed into the platform where the miter saw will eventually be mounted.

Recess for 3D printed mag switch template

I 3D printed a two-in-one template, which allowed me to route out a recess with two different perfectly aligned shapes, at two different heights. I popped out the inner part, which reveals a new guide that I can use to route to a shallow depth. And just like that I had a shape for a mag switch that’s just a hair's width above the steel linear guide rail, where I can lock it to.

While I took care of some odds and sods, it was time to route a recess for some T-track to live, so I can use a stop block with the miter saw. A router and a straight edge works great for this, but I had a momentary lack of self-confidence and didn't want any issues with the router wandering on these cuts, so I opted to use my router attachment for a track saw track.

On the right side of the miter saw, there is no raised platform, unlike the left side. Otherwise the miter saw wouldn’t be able to slide at all. So the T-track gets routed right into the top. I also took this opportunity to drill a large hole behind the miter saw for the vacuum hose to pass through.

Finish

It was time to add some finish on, but first I did a bit of sanding.

You don't have to put finish on shop furniture. I like to do it just to make sure things can be cleaned fairly easily. So if you do want to put finish on, it's a great opportunity to use up some old stuff that you have kicking around.

Drawer Fronts

Because I made beaded panels on the sides of the cabinets, I thought it would be à-propos to carry the beaded look to the drawer fronts.

I used the same bit to make a bead profile around the inside corners of the frame. This was a technique, called a jack miter, I'd never done before, so it was my moment in this project to learn something new. And I believe that if you're a home hobbyist, you should be pushing yourself every single project to expand your horizons.

Like every frame and panel, there needs to be grooves cut around the inside of the perimeter of the frame to receive the panel. The only difference in this case, because of the beaded profile, is that the vertical stiles need a groove that's a half inch deeper than the profile itself. So I made a 1” deep groove on the stiles.

I cut the stiles to length, and kept them in order so there will be continuous grain running up through each drawer front in the end. Here's the conundrum: how do you make the beaded profile look good when joining them together? I needed to remove the beaded profile between the rail and stile and make a miter where the bead will transition.

I tilted my table saw blade to 45 degrees, made a cut where the miter will be, and proceeded to remove everything else to the end of the stile by dragging the workpiece over the blade. This is safe, and it's called the speed tenon method. Obviously I am not making tenons here, but in this case it worked just fine and dandy.

For the rail to join with the stile, a tenon is needed, which is the same for any frame and panel, and I did that with the dado stack in my table saw. But it still didn’t fit together yet. I needed to miter just the bead on the rail, and then it fit like a glove and was so satisfying.

The panels themselves are pretty normal. I milled them down to about a half inch thick, which made them flush with the back of the frame. So when I put them on the draw boxes, the panel was flush to the drawer box.

I only put glue on the tenons of the rails. It’s always good practice to not glue a solid wood panel in the grooves of a frame, but the fact is, most of these panels are about three inches narrow, and therefore could be glued without regard for wood movement, because they won't move that much. I don't own a whole rack of 30 inch clamps, so I used the ones that I had, and sent some pins through those little tenons from behind, so you'll never see it.

I'm not tooting my own horn, but the drawer fronts as is were basically a perfect fit into the cabinets, which is actually not good because you want a bit of wiggle room around them. So I carefully measured and trimmed them down on the table saw, and slapped on a few coats of matching finish on the fronts.

Assembly

While that was drying, I went back to assemble everything else on the miter saw station.

You can trim aluminum T-Track down on your table saw no problem, just wear some eye protection because those little aluminum shards can go flying.

Because there was only about a three eighth inch of material underneath those T-Tracks, using tiny wood screws wouldn't have fared out too well. Instead I opted for countersunk machine screws and nuts. I could then screw the platform back down, put the top back and screw it down, and I could reinstall my favourite part: the linear guide rails and bearings, and also the mag switch.

3D printed stop block device In 3D land, I modelled an interesting stop block device that is kind of a two-in-one. First, if I have an off cut on the right side of the saw, it supports it, and is perfectly in the same plane as the bed of the saw. Next, I can lock it in place and pop up the end, which rides in a little dovetail that I modelled, and it becomes a stop block.

Miter Saw Upgrades

Made in the great state of Nebraska, mister Daniel Dunlap Woodworks makes these awesome custom hardwood zero clearance inserts for most popular miter saws out there, and I bought a fancy shmancy Wenge one. A zero clearance insert will give your workpiece full support underneath the cut so the fibers have nowhere to tear out. He gave me a 12% coupon code - WALSH12 - making it easy to support some great folks making cool products in our community.

If you want to make tearout a thing of the past, you can also get a new high quality blade, like this one from Ridge Carbide. The ones that come with the miter saw are designed for cutting two by fours on a job site. They're not really made for finish-ready cuts for furniture making. If you don't want to spend as much, I’ve got a few other options in the links below.

Drawer Front Install

Now that the drawer fronts are dry, I can get to work installing them, because it's the final step.

I carefully measured and drilled for the location of the drawer pull. You can have jigs or you can make fancy things to do this easier, but honestly, my result turned out just as accurately as other jigs that I've used in the past.

I carefully stacked all the drawer fronts, and measured the gap at the top with a pile of playing cards. Then, I counted them up and divided it by the number of gaps that I will have. Because I have four fronts, I will have five gaps. I used two small stacks of cards with that number to elevate the bottom drawer front off the bottom of the cabinet. I used the same technique to get the gaps for the sides.

With the drawer pull holes that I drilled prior, I could screw the drawer front to the drawer box. I could then safely open the drawer without the drawer front moving, pre-drill some pilot holes for four screws that will go into the rails, remove the two screws in the drawer pull holes, and drill them out to install the drawer pull.

Final Thoughts

And with that, this humongous project is complete. I've been able to use the sliding feature on the station already, and while I hate the phrase “game changing”…I think you can read between the lines and tell how I feel about it.

I have a set of plans that are a bit more simplified to make the build more accessible, but if you want to add the beaded details and the sliding mechanism, you can find those links below.

The eight drawers have given me a ton of new storage for tools that never had a home before, and I’ve been able to consolidate some other tools, and even remove a cabinet and a tool chest that were always in my way. So even though it was a ton of work, I’m stoked to have this ready to use in my shop.