OPR – My First Sled...

[Sherlock]

Hi Ed. Appreciate any suggestions for sure. I think I might see what your idea is. A triangle piece in the middle and clamp from there? Your sketch sounds like a good idea. Thanks. Jeff

[reible]

The basic sled you have will work fine all you need to do is add a couple of pieces as shown below. The yellow part is just a square with a smaller square cut out of it. You can bolt/screw that in place and once adjusted you might want to add a couple of location dowels to make putting it together again easier. The brown smaller square is a replaceable part. You can get one use out of each of the four corners. It will provide some backing for when the bit comes through. You could cut up a dozen of them to have on hand. Perhaps it could be held in place with a pair of fasteners placed where the router bit will not hit them, or be careful and use brass screws just in case.

You will need to add the clamps and get them as close as you can to the cut but of course they have to clear the router and other bits that hang down. You could get clamps that are lower profile or clamp horizontal rather then vertical???

router sled 1.jpg (51.93 KiB) Viewed 6331 times

I didn't do this to scale but it is close to correct size.

Ed

[Sherlock]

Ed, Thanks for the ideas. Just getting started using the machine, that was first Miter project with the clamps. Think that the vibration issues were the router itself and that might just be the nature of the beast. Certainly rattled the Stop off. By that I mean the threaded rod with the winged backup nut that acts as the depth stop. Now I set tight with a wrench.

In my project, I was using 3/4" stock and did not seem to be too much of an issue with cuts, even though out there a ways. I was limiting the amount of material removed with each pass. Easy to do with the OPR setup. Thinner stock might be more of a problem. I had thought about adding another piece of mini-track toward the front of the fence (toward the router) to allow clamping closer and still might do that. Ordered 36" of track so have plenty of material. Or maybe a whole piece that goes to the router but would limit other angles one could do. I sure that there will be other improvements but sure beats where I was before. Jeff