Woodworking Saw Dust-all

I do need to do something for the outfeed of my table saw. When I got the new saw, I was halfway through building the workbench, and wasn't clever enough to make sure that it was the same height as the saw, so it's actually about 6" low. I'm planning to add some additional blocking on the bottom to get it to the same height.

If you're more looking for something specifically for the miter saw, there's a bunch of folding stands out there with extendible arms. I got a Ryobi one when I got the miter saw years ago, and it works well.

The down side is that it takes up a bunch of room when it's set up, and since it's not a solid surface, you can wind up having to constantly pull the support in if you're cutting a long piece into multiple smaller ones. I don't have the space to keep mine set up, so it's kind of a pain to use the miter saw. My plan is to build a rolling miter saw stand with fold-down wings in the near future.

If you're thinking about doing the sawhorses and plywood workbench thing, it's worth grabbing a pair of 2x4s to put the plywood on. A lot of prefab saw horses have two little notches in the top that are just the right size to hold a 2x4 on the narrow edge. Put two boards across the two horses, then the plywood on top of that, and the thing will be a lot more stable than the plywood by itself.

Thanks for the rec, Evil. I'd seen a few of his videos in the Youtube recommendations, but I hadn't watched many. I did a dive into them this weekend, and I'm sold. Added that and another to the OP.

I actually got to spend a bunch of time on shop stuff this weekend. The boring, but excellent thing, is I finally finished cleaning the place up. Pulled out all the warm weather yard stuff, got everything up off the floor, and vacuumed everything. I've been wanting to get this done for literally six months, and it's awesome to finally have it done. It also means I can actually get to and use my lifting equipment, so hopefully I can get back into that.

One of the things I did a weekend or two ago was make this super simple dust separator. It's not perfect, and I still need to tweak it a bit, but until I get a better dust collector, this is doing a really good job keeping most of the dust out of the shop vac's filter.

The main thing I got done was to build a storage box to keep kid books in. I could've kept this really simple, but I wanted to try some new stuff, so I went slightly over-complicated, and decided to make it with rabbet joints and cut handles into the end panels. Mostly, I wanted to use the dado stack and plunge router. Sorry in advance for how long this is, and the lack of photos. I should remember to actually take in progress pictures if I'm gonna write these novels.

Obviously, lumber is stupid expensive, and this only needed to be functional, so I went with the most cost-effective option. That wound up being these pine bed slats. They're basically 1x4s that were around 38" long, and wound up being ever so slightly cheaper than a single 8' 1x4, so I grabbed a half dozen.

I glued them up in pairs to get wider panels. Also made two sets cauls to try and keep them flat. That worked okay, but these are cheap Home Depot pine, so there was always going to be some cupping and twisting, and there was! I always think I'm clever by doing glue ups last in the day, but the down side of that is dealing with squeeze out. The neater method is to let the squeeze out sit for about 30 minutes, then scrape it off while it's still soft, but before it fully cures. Except I never, ever remember to go back out and do that, so I wind up either wiping it off immediately (which makes a wide, thin area to sand off later) or leave it until hard (which has you sanding off thicker nubs along the joint). I need to get better about using the right amount of glue so there's less squeeze out, and do the half hour thing.

After I started laying out my cuts, I realized that I needed the bottom of the box to be wider than the double board panel gave me, so I cut two of the panels to the length I wanted the crate to be, and glued those together. This is where I noticed that I had a bunch of flat sawn boards, and I hadn't alternated the grain patterns. Oops.

Got everything out of clamps and sanded the faces as flat as I could. Since I don't have milling equipment, the joints were kind of uneven, but a bunch of sanding mostly took care of it. I really need to get some 60 grit discs for my sander.

Then I got to play with the dado stack! I did a bunch of playing around with setup blocks on a test piece, and was confused why I could set the blade height against the block, but wind up with a shallower rabbet than I wanted. I think it might have been two things. First, the outside blades of the dado stack are ground at an angle, with the high angle on the outside, and the chippers are a bit lower. I was using the outer blades to set the height, so gonna need to figure out how to do that better. I also wonder if the blade might be dropping a bit when the stack gets up to speed, because I wasn't locking the height adjust down.

Got it figured out, and started cutting joints. I did mostly okay, but went a hair too far in on the rabbets of the box bottom, so I had to tweak the others, and had some overhang I needed to clean up later. Some of the inconsistency may have also been the boards being unevenly milled. I really need a jointer and planer. I got everything dialed in pretty closely, glued and in clamps. I picked up a strap clamp, which worked really well.

Next was all the sanding! Yay sanding. Then I wanted to cut handles in the end panels. I could've drilled starter holes and used the jigsaw to cut the rest, but where's the fun in that? So I pulled out the plunge base for the router. I laid out the cut lines for the handle, put in a straight cut bit, and set up the edge guide, plus two stop blocks on the sides. I did two setups, one to cut the two short and one long edge, then a second to cut the other long edge.

The annoying thing I discovered is that my router base is a different shape on one side than the other, so flipping it around to put the edge guide on the opposite side would've meant adjusting the stop blocks. I'm lazy, so I didn't do that. But what I didn't remember is that with the way I was pushing the router vs the side the edge guide was on, I was doing a climb cut, and also had to push the router away from the edge I was cutting to keep pressure on the edge guide. That was awkward and bad, and I messed up the edge a bit. I need to not do that.

I got the handles cut out okay, then threw a roundover bit on to ease the edges of the handles and the top of the sides. This is where I wish I had a palm router, because balancing the full size router on a 3/4" surface is blah. After that, it was just sanding the edges I routed, and put on a coat of paint. Behold, a box!

The other thing I did is spend some time getting more comfortable with Sketch Up, and made a set of plans for a storage unit for sanding stuff.

The slots on the bottom left are to hold these things that hold sanding discs and let you line up the holes when you're putting them on. I've got some of those made already, and just need to tweak the length of the dowels I used. The section on the right will be for full sheets. The rest of the spaces will be for the sander, tack cloths, sanding blocks and sticks, and probably a can of spray adhesive. Let's see how this goes!

You can get a long way with 2x4s and plywood. That workbench up there is just six 2x4s and a single sheet of 3/4" plywood. You could probably do it with less plywood if you didn't do the shelves.

I've been working on that sanding storage unit that I designed up above. I get to play with my dado stack! First thing I did was start wearing gloves when changing the saw blade so I stop scraping my knuckles.

The throat plate that I made is working pretty well.

I spent a bit of time playing around with the dado stack setup to find the one that gave me the best fit. I'll probably hang onto this piece and add to it so later, I can pull it out and see if one of them fits the piece I'm working with, and if it does, I'll know exactly how to set the stack up again. Hopefully it'll save me some time later.

Got most of the dados and rabbets cut. One thing I learned pretty quickly is that doing these cuts, it's really vital that you keep a lot of downward pressure on the piece as it goes over the blades. If you don't, you wind up with minor variations in the depth of the cut, which is bad. Fortunately, the fix is "send it through again, push harder, dummy."

Hey, the rabbet joints fit pretty good!

I maaybe could have gone ever so slightly wider on the dados.

Some forceful convincing got them in. We'll see if it's easier or harder once I add glue.

All the major pieces fit together surprisingly well. I still need to cut the slots, dividers, and nailer pieces, then glue it all up.

This is kind of turning into a liveblog, so hopefully it's interesting or helpful to people.

My goal this morning was to get the slots cut, and then assemble the main body. The thin slots go all the way through the piece, so I'd use the table saw to cut those. The other slots I didn't want to go all the way, through, because the cabinet was going to be deeper than the pieces going in them, and I didn't want them to slide too far back. Doing those on the table saw would be iffy, so I'm going to use the router on them.

Setting up the dado stack was easy. The slots needed to fit 1/4" slats, and didn't really need to hold them tightly. The stack's thinnest cut setting wound up being just right. The trick with all these slots is that I needed to make five or six slots, and they needed to line up with the slots opposite them. The easiest way to do that is to set up for one slot, then cut both pieces on that setup, then set up the next, and so on. The slots were going to be evenly spaced, so I just needed to get the first one in the right spot, then move the fence 3/4" out for the next. This is where it's super nice to have a fence and measuring tape that I know I can trust.

I got everything cut, and noticed that the last slot on one of the pieces was way closer to the 1/2" dado than the other. I put them next to each other, and...

Uh-oh. What I'd forgotten is that one of those pieces was 1/2" wider than the other, because it goes into a dado on the side panels, while the other piece is the full width. That means that when I measured in from the outside edge of the base piece to set the first slot's position, I actually needed to move the position on the other piece 1/4" toward the edge to account for the dado. Lesson learned. I did some thinking about whether to cut a whole new piece, but decided that the adjusted slots would fit on the other half of the board, I didn't care about having some extra slots visible on it. So I got those cuts done, using the other piece as a reference.

Everything fits now! Something that's interesting to notice in the first photo is that the piece on the left has no tearout on the edges of the slots, while the one on the right has a bunch. That's a great lesson in the difference between a rip cut on the left (cutting with the grain) and a cross cut on the right (cutting across the grain). If I cared about tearout for this project, I'd really want to either make sure that both pieces had the grain running in the same direction so the slots went with the grain, or used a crosscut blade on the saw to cut the slots.

Next was routing out the non-through slots. Setting this up was kind of a pain. Setting the edge guide parallel to the slot would've been ideal, but the piece was tall enough that I didn't think the edge guide would reach. I wound up using the edge guide as a stop block to define the end of the cut, and clamped a board to use as a fence to make the cut straight. The problem was figuring a way to clamp the fence on both ends when it needed to be in the middle of the piece. I wound up basically keeping the fence at the edge of the bench, and hanging the work piece off the end. That worked fine.

The second trick was getting the fence consistently perpendicular to the work piece. I did that by positioning the router where I needed it, then using a speed square to line up the fence and clamped it. That was a pain. I found that using the squeezy-handle clamps actually tended to shift the fence as I clamped it, so I switched to f-clamps, which worked better. Each setup took a lot longer than I'd have liked, but I got it done eventually. I've got an idea or two for how I could improve that next time.

Can you spot where I derped out and forgot to release the depth stop, stop the router, or pick it up before I moved it? Cuz I sure can! Fortunately I was taking a shallow cut, it's in a spot where it's not really visible, and I obviously don't care about visible mistakes. Tomorrow, more routing!