brainwagon

After yesterday’s success in building a little garden stool, I wanted to get back into the garage to do a little more woodworking. Sadly, today was the last day of my “staycation”, and I still had quite a few chores. I spent part of the afternoon breaking out the pressure washer to clean the mold and lichen off our sidewalk leading to our front door, and that took a fair amount of time (although it looks quite a bit better).

So, it was after seven before I got into the workshop. And I decided that I wanted to finish a jig that I had started awhile ago: a simple little cross cut jig for my table saw. I had cut most of the pieces for it days ago, but it had been sitting in a pile on my assembly table, mocking me.

I was chickening out. The thing about a cross cut sled like this is that you want it to be really accurately set at 90 degrees, so that you can make great repeatable cuts without any fear. And because I’m still a novice, I didn’t have any confidence that I could lay such a thing out.

But, I decided to dive in.

Glue. Screws. Double checking with my framing square and my machinist square.

And, here it is.

Okay, but how square was it?

Well, holding a square against the real fence and the blade, it looks pretty square. Unless I look really hard. Then I can see that there might be the tiniest gap at the back of the blade when I hold the square to the right of the slot, and a tiny gap at the close end when I hold it to the left.

My guess is the error is something on the order of half a degree or so. This is okay for most of what I normally do, but it isn’t great for the most critical work. I can quantify the error more carefully (and probably will sometime soon) by using the 5 cut test. I’ll have to prep some 8″ or 10″ pieces of material to make the test. When I do, I’ll report back here.

I’m also thinking about adding a piece of polycarbonate across the top to provide a little extra safety. I am trying to decide if I should bore some holes to mount it, or just fasten it with some mounting tape.

I’ll ponder the various sources of error more carefully over the next few days. But for most pedestrian uses, I suspect it will be entirely adequate, at least for a while.

Anyway, tomorrow I’m back to work in a new role at Pixar which will likely take up more of my time and energy. I’m excited by the new opportunity, but want to try to make sure that I continue to make headway on some of these “outside” tasks. My goal is to try to continue to get some hours in on projects like this mostly by jettisoning more passive and useless activities like watching television. Wish me luck!