Table saw accessories and other important power tool jigs and fixtures you can buildI want to show you several table saw accessories that I've built over the years that let me safely make cuts impossible on most home-use table saws. Without these accessories, your shop may not be complete, and you may have difficulty building several of my free wood working projects. Let's take a quick peek at some of the table saw accessories and other jigs you're going to want to Do It Yourself Better and build quality affordable wood products!
This section is about more than just table saw accessories and table saw jigs; it's about all kinds of useful and powerful jigs and accessories I've built for many of my power tools. You'll see jigs I've designed and built for my 14" band saw and radial arm drill press that let me make repeatable radius cuts on the band saw and drill exactly centered dowel holes for my cabinetry projects. As a bonus, I'll show you an accessory I built that transformed my Old Milwaukee industrial angle grinder into the most powerful sanding tool I've ever used.
It's hard to say whether one jig or accessory is more important than another; the better question to ask is what tools do you have, and how can you get better safety, precision, and productivity for your projects. For full-sized table saws, simply bolting on a long solid face to your miter gauge requires no plans, just a straight scrap from other projects. It will give you far greater control moving larger stock through the blade path and let you clamp the work piece to the face for greater safety. Without doubt, the most important table saw accessory I use is the sliding table saw jig. I first came across this accessory in an obscure spiral-bound book titled "Practical Yacht Joinery" back in my boat building days. Since then I've heard it referred to as a "Sliding Auxiliary Table" which is a very appropriate name and description and it's acronym "SLAT" is what you'll see many places within this site. I've since seen many references to this wonderful jig as a "Cross-Cut Shuttle" or a "Table Saw Shuttle. The tenon/lap jig was invented out of desperation. This is one of my table saw accessories you really want to build. Many of my table and bed frame designs use 3" rails and legs relying on a deep 3" double lap joint to connect them. To make that cut by hand feeding long lengths of stock vertically through a table saw is imprecise, and potentially, very dangerous. This table saw accessory securely clamps the work piece vertically to a stable frame with an absolutely plumb back brace allowing secure feeding through the blade path. I first used a taper jig to cut matching 12:1 bevels on 20' lengths of 1x3 inch stock stock for an important boat building joint - the glued scarf joint. Three finished pieces were then laminated together to form the 40' long 3x3 inch shear-clamps for my ocean racing catamaran. That jig was used on my band saw and ran through the miter slot. This table saw variant of the taper jig runs against the rip fence and is used to build elegant tapered table legs. Diverting from table saw accessories for a moment, you've got to appreciate this nifty band saw jig that let me cut six different radius's for my cherry cabinetry project. The magic in this jig is the corner piece and bottom plate. The bottom plate has three critically spaced holes that a dowel pin in the bottom of the corner can be placed into for the different radius cuts. I've used the "Bad-Boy", a sanding accessory for a powerful angle grinder, to remove the top 1/8" from a full size burrow in 30 seconds flat! What's so special about this sanding accessory is the rectangular design won't let you tip an edge into the work surface. Because the adjacent corners are at a different radius from each other, and because we round off the corners and sand paper, the pad forces the tool to kick back onto a stable plane and won't leave terrible scores in the surface! The face plate is cut to the standard 9x11 inch size of sheet sandpaper. This is a horse, but once you get the feel of this tool, you'll never use a circular sanding pad again! And lastly, I wanted to show photos of my radial arm drill press, and the custom jigs and table I built for it as it's one of my most important tools. I included these photos for illustrative purposes only; the tool and accessories are so special purpose I don't think you you could use them. My 10" saw is my most important and widely used power tool, that's why I devote so much time to building table saw accessories. My other tools are used in conjunction with the table saw for most projects and deserve attention here. When you need precision, versatility, and repeatability from your tools, use your imagination to Do It Yourself Better! Back from Table Saw Accessories to - Do It Yourself Better Home
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