Okay, a few weeks ago I bought a little Dewalt DW745 table saw for use in my garage. I’ve never actually owned a table saw, but lately I’ve been wanting to do more construction, and I thought investing a fairly small amount of money in a table saw would be a good way to go.

And I’ve begun to do experiment with some cheap, simple projects to learn how to operate it and operate it safely.

The way I’ve decided to start is by trying to research and build some simple jigs to help me safely and accurately cut pieces of various types. One of the jigs which everyone recommends that you build is a cross cut sled.

I had some old 3/4″ plywood lying around my shop, left over from when I built my last telescope more than a decade ago. I decided to rip some pieces to form the bed and the two ends of the cross cut sled. It was good practice. All the pieces had nice clean edges, and sighting along them and checking them with a square shows the edges to be nice and straight.

The only part that I didn’t have was material to make the rails that will fit in the miter slots. While I have a fair amount of scrap plywood and softwood like Douglas Fir 2x4s lying around, I haven’t done any hardwood woodworking before, so I don’t have the usual oak or maple that most people use for it. I will probably go out and source some 1″ material I could trim down over the next few days, but while thinking about it, I ran across this nice video series of videos to help newbies like myself build their first cross cut sled.

They suggested that it actually is reasonable to cut runners out of plywood, at least if you use a good quality plywood like Baltic Birch. As it happens, I don’t have any of that either, but there is still a lot of good information here which I’m trying to absorb. If you are a beginning woodworker, you could probably learn some good stuff from this series too.