Brandon Croft - Latest

Rookie Cabinetmaker – Table Saw Upgrade, Pulleys and Belt

2011-05-12T00:00:00-07:00

Table Saw Upgrades: New Pulleys and Belt

2011 May 12

I’ve replaced the cast pulleys with more balanced machined pulleys and rubber automotive-style belt with an “Accu-Link” link style belt. This is a universally recommended upgrade for belt drive saws such as mine in order to reduce and dampen vibration. I noticed a difference and hopefully this simple upgrade will yield slightly more power.

Machined Pulleys and Link Belt

You can buy this kit from any number of dealers. I bought mine here although shipping from these guys took a little too long.

Rookie Cabinetmaker – Table Saw Upgrade, New Fence

2011-05-10T00:00:00-07:00

Table Saw Upgrades: New Fence

Upgrading a Craftsman 113. Table Saw with Delta T2-30 Fence

2011 May 10

Sears/Craftsman made a lot of contractor-sized table saws in the last 60 or 70 years, and interestingly they were pretty much the same for about 50 of those years. The concensus opinion is that these are very capable yet unexceptional saws that need a few upgrades before becoming consistently accurate.

One such typical upgrade is replacing the fence, and there’s a good reason why. It’s horrible.

The Delta T² fence is an upgrade for Delta saws that is widely available from specialty dealers and big box stores. It costs $150 or less and is considered very accurate. It weighs something like 50 pounds and has a rip capacity of about 31 1/2". To mount this fence to a Craftsman saw, you’ll need to drill holes into either the table or the rails of the fence. For this to work, you’ll need the optional 1 1/2" thick cast iron extension wings. My saw’s model number is 113.298762. I don’t recommend doing this with 1 3/8" thick extensions.

There are a few articles on the web about replacing the Craftsman fence with a Delta T², but they all seem to prescribe drilling holes into the fence itself. I think this is the wrong approach. It requires more tools, more time, and it’s more challenging to do it accurately.

It seems to be a lot easier to move the fence rails in order to use one existing hole in the table and drill another one into the table to match . The reason why people don’t do this seems to be because you have to move the ruler scale sticker to the new zero location on the fence itself, but in exchange you gain another half inch rip capacity. It was not a problem to move the sticker.

First I mounted the rails to the table using one of the factory holes and my adjustable outfeed roller to adjust the other side’s height.

Using outfeed roller to position fence

I used a 11/32" Irwin Cobalt bit and drilled the holes using the rail itself as my guide after ensuring correct height. I frequently squirted a little 3-in-1 oil into the cavity to keep the bit cool.

Drill using the rails as your guide. You only need to drill one hole for each rail.

Assembly the fence and make all the adjustments.

Adjustment: square to table

Adjustment: aligned with miter gauge

Now, move the ruler tape to your new zero position. I drew a line so that I could re-align the sticker correctly. I had to start the sticker with a razor blade.

By drilling into the table instead of the rails, the fence floats about 1/8" above the table, depending on where your nylon adjustment screws sit.

Fence floats 1/8" above table when using this method.

The fence cost me twice as much as the saw, but I think the investment is worthwhile!

Rookie Cabinetmaker – Tools and a Full Size Prototype

2011-05-01T00:00:00-07:00

Tools and a Full Size Prototype

1 May 2011

You don’t need to make a huge investment to build great cabinets. You don’t even need a shop. I took over my house’s single car garage. Here’s the minimum power tool setup for frameless cabinets:

A table saw, which is critical. I bought this old cast iron top 10" belt driven bench saw from a man on Craigslist for $75. The cool thing about most older tools is they are heavy duty, simple, and were built to last. This one was made in 1994, so only about 15 years old.
A dado set for your table saw. I bought this Delta set on Amazon, new for $118. After all, blades are consumables. There are cheaper ones available, but based on the reviews I’ve read, cheap ones have a problem with breaking on hardwood. The last thing you want is metal breaking off while spinning teeth-first at you. You’ll also need some kind of dado insert for your saw, which I’ll talk about later.
A good drill with various driving and drill bits, as well as a countersink bit. I got a Bosch 12 volt drill/driver from my local big box store on sale for $89. I love the small size, which prevents my arm from getting tired. Despite its appearance it still delivers all the power my weakness can make use of. Everyone loves Bosch tools and I can see why.
A circular saw or jigsaw to make cross cuts that won’t fit on your table saw or for special cuts, such as the toe kick area of the cabinet.

I like to remove the safety features before use

Delta 8" Dado Set

Hello, Little One

Depending on how fancy you want to get with the doors and drawers, you could probably stop here. Here are some optional setups you could go with:

A router and dovetail jig for finely finished drawers, or a router table if you want to add some fancy trim to your doors and drawers. I got a router for my birthday several years ago and my neighbor is letting me borrow his dovetail jig.
A jointer if you’re not using plywood for doors. I have a 6" cast iron “deluxe” Delta jointer that I bought via Craigslist for around $200. This could be useful for drawer boxes to make sure each side is flat, straight, and the exact same dimension because they don’t come that way.

I’m making contemporary cabinets, which call for plywood everywhere (banding the exposed edges with adhesive strips) Luckily, the simple design is exactly what we want, which is a rare thing.

This week my dado set arrived so today I got started making all the needed accessories as well as building a prototype carcass to get the feel for it.

A zero-clearance table saw insert is superior to manufactured inserts because it helps prevent chipping on the finished surfaces of the plywood. Unfortunately, you need one for each blade size you plan to cut. You can make a zero-clearance insert from wood or you can find an aftermarket template insert from a company called Leecraft. My table saw has a very small insert depth so creating my own was not a possibility.

I also made a sacrificial fence for cutting the rabbet joints at the tops of the cabinets. What this allows you to do is put the fence directly next to your dado without worrying about your table saw’s fence getting in the way.

Insert and fence (Blades removed)

I’ve never used a dado set before so I needed to practice. I recently dismantled some very old paint shelves in my garage and had enough plywood to build an actual cabinet.

Wtf am I going to do with this

The biggest lesson I learned was the best order of saw setups:

Rip the sides and back first
Cut the toe kicks into both sides, so you establish bottom and top early
Set up each rabbet and dado once, and cut both sides and then the back
Rip the top, bottom, and crossmembers/shelves. They are all the same size.

I had to set up my dados twice because I treated the back as an afterthought since it was made from a different size plywood. It’s important to not set up the same joint twice.

Another mistake I made was transferring a measurement to my saw’s fence without considering which side the blade’s kerf would be on. I re-learn that lesson frequently, though.

A cool trick I learned was to drill pilot holes from inside your dados. This way when you go to assemble from the outside your screws will be perfectly centered up without measuring. As it happens, dado joints are great because they really square up the cabinet without a lot of fuss or clamps when you assemble.

All in all it was a really worthwhile experience to work out all the problems using really cheap plywood.

You also need a hammer. Be sure the business end faces up.

Rookie Cabinetmaker – Design and Materials Estimate

2011-04-30T00:00:00-07:00

Design and Materials Estimate Using Google Sketchup

30 Apr 2011

It took three or four mockup projects before I treated Google Sketchup like a serious design tool. I don’t have any CAD and very little modelling experience so there were some conceptual hurdles that I had to overcome in order to use it as a production tool:

Typing precise measurements while using the drawing tools
Familiarizing myself with standard cabinet depths and dimensions and choosing to model them accurately. You can’t build cabinets unless you can define one I guess.
Making each piece a component once they were created so I didn’t accidentally select faces, edges, and vertices instead of entire volumes.
How and why Sketchup snaps to an axis while you’re doing stuff like resizing or rotating. It’s got a mind of its own.

If you take the time to understand these facets of Sketchup as soon as you begin, you’re already doing better than me.

Once I discovered the Cutlist plugin for Sketchup and how it visualizes and optimizes your materials, I decided that Sketchup was the best approach for design, even if it feels slower than drawing and figuring on paper.

You go figure out the bizarre distribution and installation of this plugin from the instructions found on the website and I’ll explain how I created my model to make use of it.

Standard carcass

Make each volume representing a workpiece a “Component” in Sketchup. If it’s a plywood piece, give it a name with the word “plywood” in it. That’s the only way the plugin will recognize it as a sheetgood and give the proper treatment.

Sketchup Outline with Component Names

Intersect your workpieces as you would join them. I’m doing dado and rabbet joints, which is standard, simple, and can be done with only a table saw. To make this entire exercise worthwhile, be precise! Measure every component down to 1/16" increments and duplicate as much work as possible.

Use precision

In many ways, modelling in Sketchup is a lot like building the thing. You’ve got solids that you’re trying to piece together. It forces you to consider almost every problem before you encounter it.

Here’s what you should see once you run Cutlist. For some reason I couldn’t get the Layout Output to work unless I chose SVG as the output format.

All this for free!

So here’s the design for my first set of workshop cabinets. I’ve omitted all but one drawer and the counter top. I’m still not sure where I’ll come up with one.

Rookie Cabinetmaker

2011-04-24T00:00:00-07:00

Rookie Cabinetmaker

24 Apr 2011

We need a new kitchen but decent cabinets are really expensive. I think I can build some with a little practice which is why I’ll be making some for my workshop first.

The style I’ll be creating is called Frameless or ‘Euro’, which was chosen because it looks modern. Hopefully this will prepare me to build real kitchen cabinets.

It’s going to take many months and a lot of patience, but in the end I’ll have something that I built just for my family and also a bunch of new tools.

Here is an outline of what I should be posting about:

Design & materials estimate using Google Sketchup
Tools and preparation
Carcass construction
Drawer construction
Fronts construction
Installation
Retrospective