There's quite a few videos on YouTube of people building a mitre saw & table saw combination unit but I just don't have the room for one, the mitre saw I've got measures 970mm deep when set at a 90° cut (from the front of the angle adjuster knob to the back of the sliders) and leaving it set up like that in a single car garage 2.4m wide with cupboards and a narrow bench on the adjacent wall leaves naff all room - barely enough for sawhorses, the shit concrete floor hasn't even got any dpc and gets wet from rising damp when it's been pissing it down even though there's a Arco channel drain in front of the garage door.
The smallest footprint solution I could come up with was this contraption on castors made out of some 6x50x50mm angle iron and scrap timber, the side panels are salvaged rough old plywood that had previously been used as concrete shuttering.
Many people do build stuff with scrap or pallet wood but usually after it's been ran through a planer thicknesser to clean it up and make the pieces a uniform thickness, and if pieces are being glued together to make a board - the edges are squared up on a jointer (surface planer) but I just put a front chamfer on the pieces, glued the edges and forced them together with sash clamps then fixed metal bands across the back with coach bolts going through the lot.
Anyhow, the max depth of the unit is 620mm and a Dewalt DW735 table saw folded up on its rolling stand fits underneath.
The unit is a bit high to use the mitre saw on especially with leaving the mounts on the underside of the saw for its stand, in an ideal world I'd just leave both the saws set up on their stands but don't have the room.
Probably going to add a proper top next, either a piece of melamine or phenolic ply with a router plate & T tracks inset for a makeshift router table.
Having little room is a ballache, you can go from tidy and organised to chaos in no time once you start doing stuff, small work areas also highlight how nasty grinding dust is, as your abrasive wheel is wearing down it's turning into dust settling on everything and going in your lungs.
The frame was put together with a stick welder. (definitely won't be showing the welds off on Instagram 🤣) Machine can go upto 170 amps if you use a 16a plug but run it on a 13a domestic 3 pin plug, 140a got the arc going when everything was cold but then turned it down to about 125a once the steel got warm.
Wouldn't mind doing more metalworking in the future and get better at welding.
#tools #Dewalt.
