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Member to Member Wayne Wainwright
I've been making and selling the same wood items for fifteen years. In order to speed up the production process, I came up with this method for creating duplicate parts without having to re-measure every time I need to make a run of a certain part. My trick is to use a crosscut sled with stop blocks that automatically set up the work piece for the cut I need. I started by making a simple crosscut sled for my table saw. It's nothing more than a piece of plywood with a fence and a runner. Then I drilled a row of evenly-spaced holes in the sled, just in front of the fence, as you see in the drawing.
Each stop block is just a scrap of wood with a couple of dowel pins glued into holes drilled in the block in the block (see drawing at left). The dowel pins are spaced to match the hole spacing in the sled. I make a custom-sized stop block for each part that I create. Then I label the stop block so that I know what part it's for and which holes it fits into on the sled. Whenever I need to make more of a certain part, I simply grab the particular stop block and mount it to the sled. This way I always know that the pieces will be the same size.
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by permission of: © August Home Publishing Co.
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