Thread: My mitre saw station

Hi, I have a workbench from the shed's previous owner that was used to house heavy milling and other machine shop tools, so the steel frame is bent in places and the laminated MDF bowed in places from the heavy machinery. This makes it hard to maintain the Kapex 120 SCMS level, especially as there are no feet adjustments on this SCMS. As well as that, the original bench is too low for me at 6'2" tall.

So, I made a 2400 x 420mm torsion box out of 70 x 35mm pine timber frame, with the upper and lower skins using cheap 10mm ply, except that for some reason the box, against all expectations, bulged upwards in the centre along the long axis centreline, on both sides. And I don't know why. So I made an aluminium sled for the router and flattened the box on one side. Dust everywhere. The torsion box has 8 adjustable feet to keep it level and stable on the laminated MDF benchtop.

At this stage I was ready to put the Kapex on it, when I saw a mitre station as shown here. This looked to solve a problem I had with long timbers etc, but I was not happy with the stop that was used, so made my own after some input from others in the forum.

I then added a sheet of melamine over the upper torsion box skin, added timber edging with glue and nails to seal the edges of the upper ply and melamine boards, added the track, made the base plates, bought the 400mm wide rollers from Carbatec. Each of the four MDF bases of the rollers and the stops has a 10mm x 10mm x100mm piece of jarrah which is attached to the MDF and runs in the track which is a standard Capral profile that comes in 6m lengths and takes the standard 5/16" T-bolt. The end result is shown below:


mitre-station-01 (Large).jpg
Full view of the SCMS workstation 2400 long, 480 wide


mitre-station-02 (Large).jpg
Right hand side view


mitre-station-03 (Large).jpg
Roller 400 wide


mitre-station-04 (Large).jpg
Stop with 25mm high backing board


mitre-station-04-1 (Large).jpg
Stop frame is made of 40 x 19mm pine


mitre-station-05 (Large).jpg
Rear view of stop, backing board held in position with 6mm metal rod and rare earth magnets


mitre-station-06 (Large).jpg
Rear view of stop with backing board removed


mitre-station-07 (Large).jpg
Backing board hanging from frame when not in use