Panel Cutting Table

[Rslaugh]

I've been working on building some literature storage shelves for my office. they are 33" tall and 30" wide and stack on top of each other. We built 20 of them out of 3/4 mdf. I needed a way to cut down the mdf before cutting to size on the ole BT so I built the table shown below.

It starts out with a pair of saw horses bought at the Borg. These work well for this because they have notches on the top that accept a 2x? and each leg is adjustable so if you're working on a slight incline as we were for this project you can level the table out.





The two runners were 2x6 and the cross pieces are 2x4. I made the table a bit longer than 8' to accomodate the MDF.



To saw the MDF in half lengthwise I attached a 2x4x8 to the side slightly raised to act as a stop to push the MDF against. I have a long aluminum straight edge (not shown) which was clamped to a 2x4 screwd to each end, this time raise so the top of the 2x4 was about 7/8" above the table top. With the straight edge clamped in place all we had to do was hoist a full sheet onto the side, slide it under the straight edge and against the stop, then use the circular saw to cut along the straight edge. After slicing 10 pieces in half I removed the long straight edge and on to the next step.



Now we needed to cut the halfs into three pieces that could be handled easily on the table saw. I left the long edge in place and put a similar one on the opposite side. My 4' circular saw guide was clamped so that a half sheet of MDF could be slid underneath it and up against a stop to cut a piece almost 34" long. After cutting that piece was removed and the remainder slid up to the stop to ct another 34" piece leaving a 30" piece.





With the adjustable legs on the saw horses the rig could also be used as both a table extension and an infeed or outfeed table.

[Scottydont]

Great job! Looks very similar to my setup. I use it a lot. It doubles as a assy. table too with a mdf sheet thrown on top. I used 2x4's too and I find it a bit heavy. The next one will be made from 1x4 poplar.

[Ken Weaver]

That's a really nice idea and well executed. Have never seen those sawhorses before - will have to look into those.

[ejs1097]

That looks like my sheet cutting station, saw board and all. Except I used 1x4s on the long runners and had to reinforce them. I used 1x pine for all the pieces figuring the thinner material and soft pine will cut much eaiser when I hit a support.

Makes cutting sheet good 100 times better then the old way. Best part is storage.

[Rslaugh]

Most of these stations that I've seen in the past are designed smaller than a 4x8 sheet with the idea that it's ok if they hang over the edge its ok and it will be easier to store. Both true.

The reason I made this so large and a bit heavy is we needed to cut down 10 sheets of MDF so it was nice to have a way to make repeatable cuts without remeasuring each piece. We cut 10 sheets into 60 smaller pieces in less than 90 minutes including setup time.

[RodKirby]

Great solution!