Stop Block and Fence for the Mitre Saw/Radial Arm Saw Build

okay so after the completion of the miter saw station and the radial arm saw station in the cabinets it was kind of time to move on to um some type of a fence assembly and a stop block so one of the things I've never liked about a lot of the stop blocks I see in miter stations is that the tape measure usually faces directly forward out of the actual fence or it faces directly straight up in the air so what I wanted to do is to come up with something where the actual tape measure look directly at me so I'm about 61 and um thought if I could get a 45° angle on something that it would be easier for me to look down on top of the tape so it actually uh kind of worked out by playing with this wood and this making this Big Blob of a stop block because I found out that the one of the local Home Centers had 54 popler and that 54 thickness uh was super important it came into play Big Time because um I needed to put two tape measures side by side on the middle section fence which I'm I'm showing right here between the two saws so I'm kind of getting out of order here that's actually actually the unstained finished fence and it's just to get an idea about what this thing looked at before assembly the one on the leand side of the radial arm saw and the right hand side of the radial arm saw were adjustable those T tracks were plowed into the actual benchtop because that radial arm saw uh it actually has an adjustable fence so theoretically you can take uh parts of the fence apart and the stop block assembly um all loosens up and you can slide back that fence on the radial arm saw I think about two 2 and 1 12 in something like that I don't know if I'm ever going to do that but just in case I just wanted to make sure that I had the ability to do it so uh basically it was just a couple of U datto grooves put in t tracks again and then run those uh bolts all the way through to the top edge of the actual fence assembly I didn't have bolts of anywhere near long enough to get through there I'll show those later I basically just welded them uh onto some 5/16 all thread and that allowed them to stick through those support blocks threw the plywood on the stop and put the actual uh te- nuts on the top Edge instead of having to take that apart if it wanted to get shifted so that worked uh out actually very very very well but it did give the a aail avilability to move this thing around a little bit and then for assembly basically the way this starts uh I cut the top edge of the 54 topper 45° angle then uh first cut was going through the gra table putting a rabbit on the bottom of it I was really concerned about this wood Bo and in fact it did it started to Bow before I ever got it put together so the rabbit on the bottom was just to accept a piece of plywood which of course is very stable and um so after running it through the router table then the next step of this was to go ahead and um put it l down on its back run a p cable router through cut of data in the front edge of it that's obviously for the T track and the T track uh is to hold a t nut and of course the stop nut to uh hold the actual stop Block in place so so far so good no problems yet everything was kind of huming along and of course I had to do that to all three pieces I've got three different fence assemblies one on the left side of the Godzilla chop saw one in the middle it's adjustable one on the right side of the radio arm Sol is also adjustable so uh that's so far working out good this popular is green looks green so it's going to look different here in a minute after I get it stained but uh right now I'm just an assembly and this is where I started noticing some issues I really went out of my way to glue up blocks and to glue in that rabbit on the that piece of wood that's attached the rabbit on the bottom that uh board was starting to Banana so uh with a ton of clamps and some glue and of course plywood's a great uh brace product because it's so stable so all this stuff's being glued up and U uh once it's done you can kind of see that very top edge up there it's still starting to bow to the right and uh candy the rabbit that was cut in down at the bottom is working great uh once that plywood's in place glue's dry clamps are off it held the bottom assembly perfectly flat but the Top's still a problem and I was going to use just a little piece of quarter inch plywood up there just a little bit of a design change no big deal I had to switch that around go to a piece of 3/4 in 4 in wide stock and uh I actually had to pull that with a clamp just a little tiny bit on the far end of that and this is the long section the eight-footer this is a short section that we just saw a couple of minutes ago that's between the actual chopsaw and the radial arm saw and those are the t-bolts um I could have put them on the inside but every time you wanted to move the fence around if you wanted to you'd have to take the top off so I just went to the effort to go ahead and take the 2 and 1/2 in t-bolts drill a hole through those 4x4 plywood blocks and then I just welded an extension on the ends of them that's just a piece of 5/16 all thread um the weld itself obviously is going to be hidden on the inside of the Box didn't really care about that but you know it's a little extra step right now but it definitely made it a ton easier just to go ahead and and have the bolt sticking through the top and so if that fence needs to move then the only thing you have to do is just loosen up the the bolts so gotten that done now it's kind of on to working on this actual stop block first step of course is to plow out some kind of a dado and it really isn't that big a deal even though it's a very small piece of wood I basically just use my L router I had a couple of blocks set up only have a qu a big deal just put a space in there and one two passes and that PS out a little area for a spine really that will inter the middle of the T track and then of course the uh next part of this next step of this was to take a look at how um the actual uh block itself was going to be assembled basically since I 45 the top of that 5/4 popler those are two 22 and 1/2 degree cuts which allow that top Edge to kind of hang over the 45° angle and of course on the back side of this the actual pointer assembly which is just a piece of bar stock aluminum is uh going to set so the way to make that happen is to go ahead and do your 22 and a halfs I was a little concerned about this thing uh breaking you know if I hit it bumped it with a piece of wood or whatever so I did Mark it I put just a little kind of a stop block assembly up on top of the bench and then uh set all these in there I had three of them to do so I put them in there had to kind of do a little math to figure out the right angle for the uh biscuit joiner the plate Joiner so I'm went ahead and cut one single biscuit in each piece glued them together and um those are nice and secure they'll never come apart again so that worked out pretty good as well and then of course to uh get a stop assembly I ended up using an elevator bolt on the uh inside of this that basically the stock sets against on the actual fence assembly these elevator bolts I don't know what they do for elevators um and I'll put a link in the description you can't even read that little bag but I bought these things off Amazon they're 1/42 thread which is just standard quar inch thread and all you do is uh you take a an insert and you can get those at any hardware store and drill a hole in the side of your stop block and then pound that insert in there there's not really any stress on it so it's not going to go anywhere and it just has to be offset I offset mine to the left or away from the fence about a 16th of an inch and the reason for that is that the head of that elevator bolt is uh exactly 3/4 of an inch so I just got clearance from the fence and clearance from the bottom so when it runs back and forth it's not going to hit the fence I would also advise you too to make darn sure that you put some uh blue Loctite on that stud when you insert that and the reason for that is when you fine-tune this you don't want that thing to move around so um I I put a a lock nut in a nut on there before I actually inserted the elevator bolts so if you do that then it's not going to move around when you're trying to tune it a little bit and that's just the actual piece of aluminum that I put on the back side for the pointer and that worked out pretty good last thing that happened for me is I uh this was the hardest part of this whole thing if you want to you you want to know the truth I was bound and determined to try to do a clear acetate or actually lexan pointer and it's just a you know piece of plastic that's all it is was trying to scribe a line through it and then find some fluid liquid that I could put in that scribe line to have a really clear indicator kind of like you see in your table saw uh that floats over the top of your fence assembly and jeez Louise I cut up a 12 in X 12in piece of leg and and um I don't know I tried this 15 times something like that and I finally finally got uh one of them uh to look great by using a pin and putting a mark in there and uh the pen I finally used was just a fine tip black ink pen and that worked out great and I thought okay I figured out how to do this even though I've gone through a whole sheet of sand with one of these at least I could put it on the supplemental fence that's coming up in a minute and then this happened the best one best one I did sprayed it with lacquer and it AE into the finish of the acetate ruining it the best one all right so let's just do a quick wrap up on how this whole thing worked out with this uh fence and stop block system so there's Godzilla this big old Bosch 12in saw on the right side of the saw which would be my left starts the main fence this one's permanently attached and of course it's got a stop block uh this is a stop block with the elevator bolt at the bottom I apologize for the shaky camera but I'm not on a gimbal yet so we've got a uh aluminum pointer on this one into the dado that was cut in uh with TR trck installed the thing I like about this I think the best again is this tape and I'm about 61 and it's kind of hard to tell by the video but it's pointing directly up into my eyes so it's super super simple just to run this down stop the pointer on a cut whatever it happens to be and lock it down I will say one thing about these elevator bolts these things these little darn things are great to use for a stop you see how flat that is the only problem is this little adjustment on the back of the actual elevator bolt is 7 mm so I just I mean I was in a hurry so I ran over to the a steel shop the other building and just cut this out of a piece of Steel so I would have a way to hang on to this to make the micro adjustments so I guess if you're going to do this it's probably a good idea to either get a set of ignition wrenches or something that are metric because none of the wrench sets that I have have an open-ended 7 mm wrench I just doesn't happen so anyway uh then we go to the saw itself um I I like this saw um I'm I'm not doing a product review on this it is a big saw and things like this like this handle this safety switch are things you need to get used to my hand is Big I've got a big hand and I can barely span this handle and get this safety engaged on the bottom to start saw so there's some stuff like that that is I don't know I don't really love it but uh as far as the saw capacity it's great out of the box all the settings are dead on and it will cut uh through a lot of Timber really will then we go to the fence that's in the middle this fence sets between the radial armarm saw of course and our big chop saw this fence has got adjustability see the little t-bolt uh little handle things on top this will loosen in the backside of it there is a you kind of see it through all the junk down there there is another T trck on two sides that this hooks to so this can get pushed back in case I want to move this fence around with this radial arm saw I doubt that's ever going to happen I really don't think it will but just in case then the of course the stop block here in the middle has two pointers and two tapes and again this 45 angle on the the actual fence itself had to be wide enough to accommodate two half inch pieces of that um stick on tape so that worked out great it just uh kind of barely makes it and it is again super easy to see with the pointers and stops on either side of that stop block then I didn't really film this I didn't think it was necessary but this is for short stock this basically will slide over and uh this tape is pointing straight up which again I don't really like but it's so far forward it's easy to look down on top of it that is the clear um lexand piece of plastic that I was trying to figure out a way to make that little line and you can see that I actually like that so you can see on both sides of the pointer so that worked out pretty good and this is just day in of course uh with piece of t- trck on the top of the bench the tape itself has another very shallow dado halfin dat and there's about a 16th of an inch between the top of that tape and the actual uh top itself so it doesn't get worn off so then of course we got the radio alarm saw again this is just because I like radio alarm saws I could get along just fine without it in this cut station but it's kind of nice to have two saws that you can operate at the same time on this side there's another fence assembly it's exactly like the one in the middle uh you'll see the little T knob things on top this fence can get pushed back as well and again uh just follow the same protocol this is a 45° cut on the top of this 5/4 popler and that sets the tape kind of looking directly at me so I really like that and then again same story we've got a stop block down here same thing elevator bolt this one's got of course the aluminum pointer on it and same exact situation with a short stock stop block I guess that's what you call this so these things are great they just slide over and are indexed so that we can cut down to well/ inch if you want or less and they go up on both sides to around this one's about 18 in the one on the left I think is 18 or 19 in so so far I've used this a little bit to start working on face frames for uh the rest of the cabinet build and I got to tell you I love this once these things are dialed in it really is a little surprising I kind of felt that well will they stay accurate will they be accurate and and so far I'm within under a 16th of an inch after moving them around so that accuracy is plenty good enough for me that's really what you get with a tape measure and a pencil lead so I'm all good with that so anyway that's it uh the next thing that's going to come up is the drawer assembly I don't think I'm going to shoot any video on a drawer assembly there's 10,000 videos that are out there right now on drawers but I am going to definitely shoot something on drawer facings and door fronts I I think I found a way to save a whole bunch of time making these things and really I started counting drawers and thinking geez Louie I've got I think about 20 or 22 drawer facings and door facings here and in order to do that and ever get this done I've got to find a better way a faster way to make these things and I think I've done that so that'll be the next one out I hope you subscribe if you don't subscribe it makes it really tough to make these videos so hopefully you'll do that and come back and uh we'll have something else for you I've got a bunch of ideas I'd like to film so thanks again for joining me and we'll see you later on coming to you from P5 bers place a little space