Make your own guides for a hand-held circular saw. Guide rails for hand-held circular saws
Branded guide rail for circular saw It costs almost as much as the saw itself. However, the device is very important. Why? When it is used, is it possible to do without it, is it possible to replace it with something or make it yourself? The circular saw guide provides certain benefits during operation. This article describes these benefits and also answers various related questions. Here we also consider making a guide bar with your own hands.
Purpose
Anyone who has dealt with a circular saw knows how difficult it is to ensure an even cut. Even though you try to guide the tool along the markings, it still tries to swerve. If this happens, it turns out that time is wasted and the material is ruined.
Some people get out of this situation by attaching a strip along a ruler with a pair of clamps. But with a hand-held circular saw, this method is inconvenient because the clamps touch the tool.
Other reasons in favor of the guide:
Making at home
The main thing is to accurately maintain the geometry. The basis could be:
- channel;
- pipe with a rectangular cross-section;
- corner;
- laminate.
A serious disadvantage of wooden and pressed tires is their sensitivity to moisture.
Option 1. Laminate tire.
This will absorb the depth of cut (approximately 1.5 cm), but similar device convenient and easy to manufacture.
Option 2. The basis is building code. A model with handles that move along a groove is suitable.
Option 3. To obtain an accurate cut, it is necessary that the edge of the tool base adjacent to the guide be perfectly smooth. Professional tools with cast soles are distinguished by this, but inexpensive stamped bases do not have this property. Therefore, we offer the rail option. The tool moves along it without resting against the guide rail. At the same time, the force required to push the saw is significantly reduced. The rail can be made of aluminum U-shaped profile. You need two segments with different sections. The smaller profile is inserted into the larger profile without any gap, but free movement must be ensured.
Now the guide rail can be made by hand:
- A larger diameter guide is attached to plywood No. 3 with screws. The heads of screws and self-tapping screws are ground off so that they can be hidden flush.
- We tightly place strips of plywood No. 10 on both sides of the guide and also fasten them with self-tapping screws. Plywood can be replaced with chipboard.
The excess width pieces are sawed off, and the rail is ready.
Preparing the hand saw:
For a perfect cut, the edge of the tire is placed on the marking and the guide is attached with clamps. With a guide rail, the saw moves smoothly and does not wobble, cuts accurately and feeds easily.
Conclusion
A guide for a “circular saw” is an extremely useful device, because every craftsman knows how important it is to ensure an even cut. Using a guide when working with a circular saw makes the process convenient and fast.
- Stop ruler
- Materials and assembly
- External guide
- Rail miter box
A guide bar for a circular saw is a device that ensures an even cut. There are two ways to help make a straight cut:
- Rigid fixation of the electric saw on the work table.
- Stationary fastening of the workpiece, installation of a guide rail for a manual circular saw.
The first option involves fixing the tool on a workbench, while the workpiece moves along a guide. The quality of the cut will be high, but the dimensions of the workpiece are limited, due to the size of the machine. With the second processing method, the workpiece parameters can be arbitrary. The main thing is that the trimming tool is securely fixed.
Manufacturers of carpentry equipment produce a wide range of guide bars for circular saws. The parts are easy to use and meet safety regulations. The design drawing includes a straight edge. In some cases, it is possible to set the required degree of inclination of the cutter; it is possible to avoid backlash and jamming of the working element when it moves.
The factory carriage installed on the circular saw does the job well, but is expensive. The article describes how to assemble a saw guide bar yourself.
Stop ruler
Independent production of devices for circular saws requires strict adherence to safety rules.
The cutting stop is often used when processing material with a circular saw; it is effective only in the case of a jigsaw; problems may arise with cutting: the tire is pressed to the workpiece with a clamp.
The bracket protrudes from the bottom and top of the machine table top. The result is a limiter on the length of the cut, but the saw motor inevitably rests against the clamp, and the cut is performed in two stages. The quality of the edge will be poor and there is a high chance of creating an undesirable step: to ensure a perfect cut, continuous movement of the cutting blade is necessary from the beginning to the end of the lumber. In factory models, the fastener is placed outside the circular saw line and does not interfere with work.
Materials and assembly
A homemade guide rail can be mounted from aluminum plaster rule. The device has a complex configuration; on one side it is equipped with a longitudinal groove for installing the handles in a convenient position. Hidden clamps can be made from quick-release screwless clamps.
The paw from the clamp must be removed and fluoroplastic or polypropylene sliders installed in its place. The material of the moving element must be durable and have a low coefficient of friction. It is best to shape the part with a milling cutter or a hacksaw for metal with fine teeth, but in the second case you will have to additionally shape it using a file.
At the next stage, the runners are installed in the groove of the rule, from which a guide for a hand-held circular saw will be created.
It is necessary to ensure that the sliding is free, but without play. It is not necessary to use excessive force: the unit must be fixed during operation.
Screw the slide to the top of the clamps. In this case, you need to make sure that the connection is strong so that spontaneous unwinding of the unit does not occur during operation. This will damage the workpiece or cause injury.
The guide bar for the circular saw should hold well and not give any play. The resulting design will allow you to unravel flat lumber, the length corresponding to the same parameter of the ruler minus the margin on the sides of the clamps.
If during the test sawing a perfectly even cut is obtained, nothing interferes with the work, it means that the technology was followed and the guide was made correctly.
The advantage of the design is that the line is inexpensive. Labor costs are also insignificant, consisting only of the formation of the sliders.
External guide
A device with a guide bar has a drawback - the need to control the lateral contact of the saw with the ruler. If you are cutting a piece that is too wide, your arms may not be long enough to guide the material. The solution is to use a carriage with ball bearings. It won't be that cheap, but it will pay off in the future.
The guide carriage can be made from a corner and metal plates. The width is adjusted using wing locks integrated into the movable grooves. A profile of complex configuration is purchased in a specialized department of a hardware store. There may be several options, but you need to ensure rip fence for circular.
If for some reason it is not possible to make an auxiliary element from a profile that will guide the cut along a clear line, you can buy an assembled device consisting of a carriage and a guide. The circular will be firmly connected by the sole to the carriage structure.
It is important to achieve strict parallelism of the circular motion along the profile. An incorrectly installed stand will result in a loose cut. It is easy to make an external guide bar for a circular saw with your own hands. As a result, it will be possible to guide and process large-sized lumber, make high-quality cuts, trimming will be accurate, and the saw will make easy movements. Feeding can be done manually or using a guide rod.
Rail miter box
The operation of a circular saw with a guide bar assembled using the first two methods will be comfortable, but quite slow. To speed up the process, it is better to use a rail miter box. To make a guide device you will need:
- same type of metal corners (2 pcs.);
- a sheet of plywood or chipboard with a thickness of 1.5 cm (as a base);
- nuts and bolts (4 sets).
The guide angles must be fixed in one plane at a distance slightly greater than the thickness of the workpiece. The workpiece should move freely under the rails, the cutting wheel should not be too high. The bolts will act as studs. To reduce friction, you can glue fluoroplastic strips, but it is better to equip the device with wheels.
A guiding tool made according to this design is complex, but its efficiency is higher.
The video shows the assembly process and operation of a circular saw with a guide bar.
Any citizen, purchasing a cutting power tool for household work for the first time, very quickly comes to the conclusion that, despite all the delights of the purchase, it is not able to provide an even cut on its own. Additional equipment required. It’s good if the manufacturer took care of consumers and diversified its range with such devices. What to do if the creators of your unit did not show such foresight?
In any case, do not despair and certainly not think about replacing the power tool. Perhaps you are luckier than the clients of “caring manufacturers”. The fact is that in almost 100% of cases, additional accessories are compatible only with power tools created by the same company. At the same time, the price for them, to put it mildly, is not adequate for what you hold in your hands. No one can convince me that the cost of an aluminum circular saw bar can be 100and more than % of the cost of the saw itself.
Business sharks bite, but we have to cut. Luckily, there are always arguments against predators. One of them is making accessories for power tools with your own hands. Moreover, making them is not as difficult as it might seem.
Today's story is about making your own guide bar for a circular saw.
There are plenty of examples of homemade guides on the Internet. Most of them are created according to the same principle - a flat block, against which you need to press the sole of a circular saw and at the same time push the saw along the guide. This can be a flat board attached to a workpiece to be cut or a separate tire in the form of a strip of plywood along which a beam (slat) with a smooth edge is attached.
After thinking carefully, I was forced to abandon this approach and here’s why:
Firstly, when cutting, it is necessary to simultaneously apply multidirectional forces to the saw body - forward (for cutting) and to the side (for pressing against the template). The evenness of the cut in this case is better than without a guide, but still depends on skill.
Secondly, there must be absolute confidence that the edge of the saw sole with which we press against the even template is absolutely parallel to the cutting blade. I have a cheap household saw with a stamped rather than cast base. From work experience I know for sure that on my saw these things are not parallel. In addition, the electric motor of the saw is located quite low and the even template to which it needs to be pressed will be too thin and flat. Raising the saw above the base will reduce the depth of cut and further disrupt the parallelism of the blade and the edge of the base (flimsy design).
In order to compensate for the shortcomings of the mentioned guides and my own circular saw, I chose another option. The saw will move along the metal rail, rather than rest against a flat template, which will make it possible to apply force only to move the saw forward. In addition, this force will be less (rails after all). Using a metal template instead of a wooden template will increase the accuracy of the cut and the durability of the guide itself.
I started designing the tire by purchasing a cutting disc. Most often, laminated chipboard and plywood will need to be sawed. To ensure a clean cut, a disc with a large number teeth (the more teeth, the better the cutting line).
I purchased U-shaped aluminum profiles as rails from a construction supermarket. The smaller profile fits into the larger one without any gap or play and slides freely along it.
Let's start designing:
- We fasten a large aluminum guide to a sheet of plywood 3 mm thick with M3 screws and nuts. Screws and self-tapping screws must have flat heads so that they can be screwed flush..
- Close to the guide, we fasten 10 mm thick plywood with self-tapping screws. I had pressboard laminated platbands of the same thickness on hand - I used them instead of plywood.
Now let's move on to the circular saw.
- The photo shows that the smaller profile inserted into the larger one protrudes by 1 mm. Having screwed the profile with self-tapping screws to the end of the workbench, I removed the excess with a jigsaw.
- We attach a smaller profile to the base of the circular saw, parallel to the cutting blade, and secure it with two M4 thumbscrews. I've already talked about problems with the base on my saw. Therefore, I was guided not by the platform, but by the plane of the cutting disk. To ensure parallelism between the disk and the fixed profile, I lifted the protective casing and pressed a flat wooden block to the disk, and then pressed the trim to it aluminum profile. I secured it all with clamps, drilled holes in the profile and tightened it. Then he removed the clamps and removed the block. The saw is ready.
When working with a hand-held circular saw, the issue of straightness of the cut arises. There are two concepts for ensuring a straight line:
Fastening the circular saw itself to the sawing machine (workbench).
In this design, the hand tool is permanently attached to the table, and the workpiece moves along a guide. The cutting quality is excellent, but there are serious limitations on the size of the material being processed.
The workpiece is fixed permanently, and a guide ruler is installed for the hand-held circular saw.
In this design, the size of the workpiece to be cut can be any; the main thing is to ensure strong fastening of the device for the circular saw. Manufacturers of hand tools have taken care of users and offer various ready-made devices for sale.
Industrially manufactured guides are convenient and safe. As a rule, they are equipped with an accurate marking ruler; some allow you to set the cutting angle. The material is selected in such a way as to eliminate wedging and play during tool movement.
The pair, consisting of a groove and a runner, is protected from the penetration of sawing products and does not require lubrication.
However, all these kits have a high cost, and many home craftsmen make a rail for.
Let's consider options independently invented and created by home-grown “Kulibins”.
IMPORTANT! A hand-held circular saw is a source of increased injury, so when manufacturing homemade devices Based on this, safety precautions should be followed.
The simplest option is a cutting stop
The device is actively used when cutting with a jigsaw.
It works quite effectively, but is limited in its suitability for a hand-held circular saw. The tire is pressed against the workpiece using a clamp. The bracket protrudes above the work surface both from below and from above.
As a result, we get restrictions on the length of the cut. The circular motor rests against the clamp, and you have to make the cut in two steps. In this case, the quality of the edge deteriorates and a step may form.
When working with a hand-held circular saw, the issue of straightness of the cut arises. There are two concepts for ensuring a straight line:
Fastening the circular saw itself to the sawing machine (workbench).
In this design, the hand tool is permanently attached to the table, and the workpiece moves along a guide. The cutting quality is excellent, but there are serious limitations on the size of the material being processed.
The workpiece is fixed permanently, and a guide ruler is installed for the hand-held circular saw.
In this design, the size of the workpiece to be cut can be any; the main thing is to ensure strong fastening of the device for the circular saw. Manufacturers of hand tools have taken care of users and offer various ready-made devices for sale.
Industrially manufactured guides are convenient and safe. As a rule, they are equipped with a precise marking ruler; some allow you to set the angle of inclination of the cutting blade. The material is selected in such a way as to eliminate wedging and play during tool movement.
The pair, consisting of a groove and a runner, is protected from the penetration of sawing products and does not require lubrication.
However, all these kits are expensive, and many home craftsmen make their own circular saw blade.
Let's consider options independently invented and created by home-grown “Kulibins”.
IMPORTANT! A hand-held circular saw is a source of increased injury, so when making homemade devices based on it, you should adhere to safety precautions.
The simplest option is a cutting stop
The device is actively used when cutting with a jigsaw.
It works quite effectively, but is limited in its suitability for a hand-held circular saw. The tire is pressed against the workpiece using a clamp. The bracket protrudes above the work surface both from below and from above.
As a result, we get restrictions on the length of the cut. The circular motor rests against the clamp, and you have to make the cut in two steps. In this case, the quality of the edge deteriorates and a step may form.
Any craftsman will tell you that a high-quality cut is obtained when the saw moves continuously from the beginning to the end of the workpiece.
In industrial designs, the fasteners are placed outside the ruler and do not interfere with the free passage of the tool.
A homemade guide is made from a ready-made tool of a different profile, which has a low cost. We buy a long aluminum rule (emphasis on and) for plaster or screed.
Its cost is 3-4 hundred rubles. The tool is a profile of a complex shape with a smooth groove on the reverse side for adjusting the position of the handles. The fastening is clamping, with hex nuts. Not suitable for our purposes.
As a donor for hidden clamps, you can use screwless quick-release clamps, which also have a reasonable cost. Their main advantage for our design is the removable upper leg.
Let's delete it. At the same time, the tool can be returned to its complete set at any time and used for its intended purpose. Instead of paws, we make and fasten runners from a piece of fluoroplastic or polypropylene. The main criterion when choosing a material is strength and low coefficient of friction.
You can process the workpiece using a milling cutter or a hacksaw for metal with a fine-toothed blade. In the second case, you will have to, as they say, “finish it with a file.”
We adjust the runners to the groove. Sliding should be without sticking, at the same time, strong play is also not needed. There is no need to try too hard; this unit will be fixed during operation.
We screw the sliders to the top of the clamp rail. The connection must be strong, since there should be no spontaneous release during cutting, as this can lead to injury or damage to the workpiece.
We check the functionality of the design. The homemade guide ruler holds securely, there are no backlashes.
This design can be used to process flat workpieces of any size, as long as the length of the ruler is sufficient. In our case it is 2 meters. Taking into account the margin at the edges for fixing the clamps, the working length is 1.5 meters. More than enough for most household jobs.
If your requests are longer, you can use the 2.5 or 3 meter rule. The most reasonable set is a three-meter ruler. You can cut a piece 50 cm long from it, and you will have two rulers - for large-area workpieces and narrow boards.
We are conducting tests. The cutting line is perfectly straight, nothing interferes with the free passage of the circular saw.
And most importantly, the purchased tool is not damaged during the manufacture of the device. Both the clamps and the rule are returned to their original state at any time and used for their intended purpose. Labor costs are minimal - in fact, only the sliders are manufactured.
DIY remote guide bar for a circular saw
Despite many advantages, the previous design has a significant drawback. It is necessary to constantly monitor the lateral pressure of the circular body to the ruler. If the width of the workpiece cut during cutting is too large, the arms may simply not be long enough.
The solution is to use a carriage on ball bearings. The design is not so budget-friendly (at a minimum you need to buy bearings), but its capabilities cover all costs. The operating principle is visible in the illustration:
The carriage is made from metal plates and a corner. To adjust the width, you can use wing clamps installed in movable grooves. A profile of complex shape can be purchased at an aluminum structural materials store. There are many options, the main thing is to provide support with bearings on the top and sides. For example, one of these options.
The profile should provide fastening of the C-shaped clamp inside the tire. You can purchase a ready-made design from a selected pair of carriage and guide.
It all depends on the budget of the event. The sole of the manual circular saw is firmly attached to the carriage.
IMPORTANT! It is necessary to ensure strict parallelism of the movement of the circular saw along the profile, otherwise the cut will be a loose cut.
This self-made tire allows you to cut large-area workpieces. At the same time, the movement of the saw is light and smooth; feeding can be done either by hand or by a guide rod.
Rail miter box for manual circular saw
The listed designs are well suited for leisurely cutting of single surfaces. In cases where it is necessary to quickly and accurately cut large quantities of boards, the work will be done slowly. Then a rail miter box is used.
For production you will need:
- Two metal corners of the same profile and length;
- Flat base (plywood or chipboard with a thickness of at least 15 mm);
- Bolts and nuts of the same size, 4 sets.
At a distance slightly greater than the thickness of the workpiece, guide angles are attached. The board must move freely under the rails, and at the same time the saw blade cannot be too high.
We use bolts as studs. It is important to maintain parallelism and place the corners on the same plane. The photograph clearly illustrates the operation of the device:
To allow the sole of the tool to slide freely along the guides, you can glue fluoroplastic strips to reduce friction.
But it would be more correct to install wheels - for example, ball bearings. Manufacturing is relatively labor intensive, but the system is very effective and safe. If you need to make cuts at an angle, just screw two screws into the base, into which the board will rest.
Still have questions? Watch the video: do-it-yourself guide rail for a circular saw.
