Panel Sled

I had two crosscut sleds, and one was way too small, while the other was way too heavy. So I designed a panel-style sled with a few new features that would make Norm proud, using my way easier version of the five-cut method.

I started with a super flat piece of two by four, three quarter inch Baltic birch plywood. It doesn’t have to be Baltic birch, just something high quality, flat and stable. I cut it in half–one half for the base, and the other to cut two strips out, that are about one and a half inches wide. Baltic birch plywood for panel sled I glued them together so they’ll make up a thick and stable fence. I clamped a two-foot level to it while the glue dried to make it flat. While the glue dried, I moved on to the base.

I am, admittedly, lazy, and I don’t really care for lifting heavy things if I don’t have to, so this is what prompted me to build my small and mighty crosscut sled in the first place. I love it, and I use it all the time because it’s so much easier to grab and throw on my table saw. But it doesn’t cover everything.

About five percent of the time I still need to crosscut something wide, like when I made the panels on my workbench, and I absolutely hate my old sled that I built six or seven years ago that I made massive because the YouTubes told me to. I genuinely don’t understand why it’s better to have one massive sled to try and do everything, rather than having a few smaller sleds that are purpose built to specific tasks. Yeah, one large sled probably takes up less room than several smaller sleds, but my shop is just about as small as it gets, and it’s just not a big deal. Huge panel sled In order to make this panel sled even lighter, I cut off a corner. It’s rather arbitrary, but I left about 4” in front of where the fence will be. This will also make it less tippy on the left side of the saw.

I could also have drilled a bunch of large holes in the base to lighten it even more, but that seemed like a lot of work and besides, the sled will be light enough to prevent me from complaining about it already. But I did have to drill a few holes for a specific reason in the base.

I do not like making wooden runners. Sue me. Like I said in the last video, they swell up in the summer months, when it’s humid here, so I sand them to make them usable. Then when it dries out in the winter months, the runners are too loose. Aluminum runners for panel sled Aluminum runners–boom. You can adjust them with an allen key if you need to, but in the 9 months of using this sled, I think I adjusted them once? And I think that was when I dropped the sled because I’m a ding dong.

So to access the adjustment screws in the future, this is why I needed to drill a few holes through the base. I didn’t even realize this until after using the sled for a while, but having the adjustment on the top makes it super easy in comparison to some others, like the Kreg miter bar. On this one you have to remove the bar when you want to adjust it, then place it back in to see if it’s good or not–essentially you’re guessing and checking. But having the adjustment accessible from the top allows you to adjust it and immediately know if you’re good or not.

I think people are way too scared of taking clamps off too early, but have you ever had a perfectly fitting joint not go together because the glue seized up? It only takes minutes for glue to tack up, and if it doesn’t, then you’re probably using way too much glue. So after 20 minutes, the glue on the fence was dry enough for me to move on to it. I cut the parts oversized at the beginning so I could trim them down to final size at this point.

The inspiration for this sled came from good old Norm from The New Yankee Workshop. He used this kind of panel style sled for everything, and I gravitated toward it because of how big a capacity it has relative to how light weight it is. Also because the fence is on the far side of the workpiece, so it doesn’t tend to tip back at you when crosscutting wider boards. Rounding over sled edges Before I assembled everything, I gave it all a quick round-over to make it less of a hazard I figured I’d probably cut myself on it. Here’s a great tip for doing round-overs on plywood so you don’t get any frayed edges: do a climb cut, but only with an eighth inch bit or less. Any bigger and you risk the router running away on you.On the edge of the fence that the workpiece will butt up to, I made an eighth inch chamfer so that saw dust didn’t make my cuts go all wonky. I’ve done this for all my sleds and it works every time.

Now this step is completely optional, but I like to put a coat of finish on my more permanent shop jigs. It just keeps it cleaner. I typically will use a water-based acrylic for all my shop stuff because it dries really fast – like General Finishes High Performance.

I figured people might wonder why I put the sled on the left side of the blade if it might be more stable for it to be on the right side of the blade. The mysterious answer is that I did it just cause.

I mounted the miter bar. I lowered my table saw blade to just below the tabletop, and brought my fence over so it was right above the left edge of the blade. I left just a scootch of the blade protruding from the edge of the fence to ensure a fresh edge on the sled base after the first cut. Fresh edge on panel sled base The miter bar has washers that fit into the t-slot that I needed to remove so I could take the miter bar back out of the slot as I worked on it.

I lay some spacers down in the miter slots so that when I put the miter bar in the slot, it would stick up slightly above the table. Next, I put a few dabs of CA glue along the miter bar. I lay the base down on the miter bar, while keeping slight pressure against the fence. I couldn’t really spray accelerator anywhere, so I put some weights on it for a few minutes while the CA glue hardened.

The CA glue isn’t that strong in this instance, since I bonded a not-super-porous aluminum with plywood that’s been finished with acrylic. So I sunk some screws into the base to secure it. I love using self-centering drill bits, they make my life so much easier for attaching hardware like this. Self-centering drill bits for attaching hardware I got several criticisms in my last sled video about using ¾” plywood for the sled base, that I’m wasting too much of the blade height because of that. But after ten months of using it, there was only one instance when the height was an issue, so I just used my miter gauge.

This sled in particular is designed for panels, which tend to be big and wide, but definitely not thick. I feel like people tend to over-build things to try and make them work 100% of the time, rather than making them more suitable, accurate, and convenient for tasks 95% of the time. That is to say I would rather sacrifice the height for a more stable base that will remain flatter, and therefore more accurate over time. And that last 5% of the time when this sled doesn’t work, I’m sure I can figure out something else.

In my last video I didn’t use the five-cut method because I really don’t think it’s necessary, but just to shake things up a bit, I wanted to show you how I do it in the least boring way I can muster. You need a pair of calipers, and a set of feeler gauges to do this.

I screwed the fence to the base at the corner closest to the blade. This is the point where I made slight adjustments to really dial in the fence. I carefully aligned the fence with the blade using a square, clamped it down, and screwed one screw in the other end. That’s the starting point. Sled fence square Starting with a 24” square piece of plywood – the same dimension as our fence, which makes our life easier later–I cut a thin sliver off one side, rotate 90 degrees, cut another sliver off the adjacent side, rotate again in the same direction, cut a sliver off the 3rd side, and rotate a fourth time to cut a sliver off the fourth side. Rotate it one more time so that you’re back to the first side, and cut off approximately a 1” strip. Mark the close side and the far side of the strip so you don’t forget.

Measure both ends of the strip and note the difference in values. If your far side is narrower, you need to rotate the fence counter-clockwise. If the far side is wider, rotate the fence clockwise. Workshop calipers To figure out how much to rotate it by, if your strip is approximately the same length as your fence, then all you need to do is divide the difference in width of your strip by four. That’s it. That’s why I used a 24” square for my fence that’s 24” long.

The specifics of that math is as follows: We know our strip is almost 24” long, we cut a little bit off the ends, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not a big deal. Since we rotated the square 4 times, the difference in width between the far side and the close side of the strip is actually divided by 4. And because the fence and the square are pretty much the same size, we don’t have to do any more math. The difference between the narrow end and the wide end of our strip divided by four is the amount we need to pivot our fence. So in my case, the difference is 0.072” divided by four, which is 0.018.”

If you need to pivot the fence counter clockwise, grab your feeler gauges for the amount we calculated before, and use it to space a block back from the fence by clamping it down to the sled base. You then undo the one screw on the far end of the sled to pivot the fence into the block.

Mine had to move clockwise, so I started by clamping the block to the sled right up against the fence with no feeler gauges. I then undid the one screw so I could pivot the fence clockwise away from my block. I used my feeler gauge to space my fence the correct distance away from the block. Five cut method for a sled I clamped the fence back down into the base, and drilled a new hole to secure the fence into its new position. Do not use the old hole! It’ll pull the fence back right where it came from.

I repeated the five cut method to check how close I was. And it was good enough for me.

I sank a few more screws into the fence to secure it permanently, and now it’s useable as is. It’s a super simple design, but I wanted to jazz it up just a bit.

I really like to use stops, and more specifically flip stops, when I can to get consistent results. The only problem is that flips stops are usually pretty jank in my experience, they’re never rigid enough. BUT, I have found one that is really good, and it’s the Veritas one. Veritas flip stops I used the large size for my small and mighty crosscut sled, and for this build I used the small one. That’s because I made a short fence since, like I said before, panels I tend to cut down are generally not very thick, usually no thicker than ¾”. This is not the sled to be trying to crosscut a giant 2.5” thick tabletop – you shouldn’t be using any sled or your table saw to cut something that size, that’s just dangerous and a surefire way to get a hernia.

To use the flip stop, I got some of this t-track with a spot for an adhesive measuring tape, because it’s a pretty dope thing to have. Usually stops and measuring tape are only so accurate, but you see, veritas were thinking hard about this stuff and they put a set screw here so you can dial in the exact position of the stop in relation to the tape. I’m not sponsored by or affiliated with them or with Lee Valley, I’m just a fan boy.

You do have to drill your own holes through this t-track though, but it’s no biggie. Sled with adhesive measuring tape Last step was installing the adhesive measuring tape. I used a steel rule up against the tooth of the saw blade to line up the stop at 6 inches. I peeled back a little bit of the adhesive on the end so I could line up the tape with the 6 inch mark at the stop, and go for it. I wasn’t worried about it being bang on because with the set screw on the stop, I can make small adjustments so that it’s perfect.