![]() To build the router sled, you’ll need nominal 1 1/2" electrical metallic tubing (EMT), tools and a router with a suitable flattening bit. The wheels strung onto U-bolts form the glide mechanisms that allow the router carrier to travel along the rails. It includes a CNC-routed Baltic birch router carrier and a pair of trunnions, as well as U-bolts, hex nuts, washers and nylon wheels. The assembled sled lets you pass your router back and forth in an XY-plane to consistently flatten an entire slab.Ĭombined with materials you supply, the kit offers an excellent option for milling live-edge tabletop slabs that are too large for a conventional thickness planer and jointer, or for projects using wood with difficult grain such as crotch wood, burls or knots. That worked well and my back was very thankful to not be working on the ground, but it did take me about two weeks to get all of the sawdust cleaned up.This innovative kit provides the necessary hardware to build a large-capacity router sled for flattening slabs. To make these tables I put the sled on my workbench so I could secure the smaller slabs. I made this sled to batch out some tables from some wood I collected last year that is dry now. ![]() I’ll leave a link below to the inexpensive router bit I found on amazon that worked well. But it still needed some belt sanding to smooth it out. The router came out a lot cleaner and was faster because the bit takes a much wider cut each pass than the circular saw. Now I did make this to work with a router as well, so I went ahead and tried that. My results were a bit rough, but it would clean up quick with a belt sander, or I could have gotten better results by moving the sled less between each pass. It’s a personal judgement based on the slab and tool whether you need to secure the slab to something. For testing I just put a heavy slab on my driveway and then wedged it so it wouldn’t rock. ![]() To make sure the rails are perfectly straight you could run them over the jointer or table saw, but I wanted to show this entire build could be done with just a circular saw and still give good results so I skipped that. For that I used some straight 2”x4” cut offs and screwed some feet onto them to make them stable. This will make feeding the saw go slowly, but I think that speed loss will be made up by the fact that you’ll removing quite a bit more material in each pass. ![]() I positioned the saw at a slight angle so it will cut a groove instead of a thin kerf with each pass. Then I used a handful of wood screws to secure it snuggly to the base. I used those marks to help me position the saw on the base because when the blade is lowered it has to fit inside that cut out. Glue and brad nails would work just as well, but I didn’t want to wait for glue to dry.įor the circular saw to work in this I cut a base that would fit snuggly inside of the sled and marked where the cut out in the sled met the base. I used a pilot bit that pre-drills and counter sinks at the same time to make sure the screws wouldn’t blow out the wood. I assembled the whole thing using 1 1/2” #8 wood screws. Then I just copied the finished piece onto the second piece and cut it out. To make the ends I mocked up the sled and then transferred the height of the front and back to the end piece and connected the dots before cutting it on the bandsaw. I decided to leave the back wall of the sled tall thinking that add more rigidity because of how wide the sled will be. I raided my plywood scrap pile to get all the pieces for this.
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