Table Saw Crosscut Sled with Jig

When I got my table saw, the first project I made with it was a crosscut sled. It was imperfect as first projects tend to be, but I made do. The wood runners I put on it have gotten worse over time, though, and there got to be considerable play in the miter slots. I've felt for a while now that I needed to make a new crosscut sled, then came the issues I was having creating hexagons for drum making. 

I made a special purpose adjustable angle jig, but that failed to make things as easy and accurate as I had hoped. Then, I saw a YouTube video by Busted Knuckle Woodworks about using 3D printing to make a versatile crosscut sled with replaceable zero clearance plates, and jigs. The idea for the angle cutting jigs was a head-slapping moment for me: of course, if you make a two sided jig that is double the angle you want to cut, and make the cut on both sides, you will get a perfect angle when you put the two opposite side cuts together, even if the jig is not perfectly orthogonal to the blade. (Of course... 🙄.)

At first I was going to buy the files and plans to make the Busted Knuckle Woodworks sled, but I ran into a sticking point: my 3D printer was too small, even for their models for small format printers. I figured I could reverse engineer the pieces, and make my own, scaled for my own printer.

The first thing I tried to print was an alignment guide for the back fence, but that didn't work for whatever reason, and I had to use the "5 cut method" to square the fence to the blade. I had already rejected the idea of using 3D printing for the replaceable zero clearance plate, and instead make a better version of the method that I had been using on my old sled: screwing a new board over the whole fence whenver the runout got too bad. But, instead of my slap-dash method of just driving in woodscrews to hold the board in place, I used my CNC machine to cut perfectly placed holes for threaded inserts, and making matching holes for bolts in the replaceable fence. 

Once I realized the utility of using the CNC machine, I rejected 3D printing the angle jig as well, and made a jig out of plywood using the same threaded insert and bolt idea.

I was relieved that on the very first test, I got a near perfect result.