jo041326 said:
I'm thinking about replacing it with Incra Miter 2000 or 3000SE. Just to route a dado to the MDF, slide a t miter channel and connect Incra's Miter. Did anybody think about it or did it?
Hi, Josef. If you'd asked me in early March, I might have been able to give you an answer.
That's the ETA for my newest jumbo MFT. It'll have about six t-tracks in it, but I'm undecided about a miter channel. The reason I'm undecided about the miter channel is that I'm thinking about two alternatives.
One is to dedicate a separate bench for miters only. It would basically be the same idea you're thinking of, but not so big, because I don't usually need that much room for the furniture-sized miters I'd be making. (I'd use a chop saw for architectural-sized moulding.) I have a MFT 800 that I almost never use, so I might go that route. I could store it under my jumbo MFT just like I do now. Because you wouldn't be using it for clamping, you wouldn't need to use the usual MFT top with the grid of 20mm holes. This frees you to try other things, like using t-tracks for mounting things to help clamp the wood in place. You could also use a torsion box for the table top so it will be more likely to stay flat over time. You'd need to order a couple of MFT extrusions (or cut some little pieces from a longer extrusion) and mount them on the front and back of the torsion box in order to receive the mounting brackets for the guide rail. (This is what I'll be doing with my new jumbo MFT, because I don't use the extrusions on the perimeter of the MFT for anything else.)
[EDIT: whoops, I didn't see that Corwin had already posted this idea before I did. :-[ I'll leave it up for whatever worth the other details might have.] The other alternative is to build something like the Incra Miter 5000, but leave the runners off the bottom, and design it so it can be registered against the guide rail and then clamped in place so it'll be easily installed & squared every time. Take a big, wide piece of the same stock as you use to make this device, and slip it under the guide rail and on the "off cut" side of the guide rail to support the work piece and off-cut. This could also be stored under the jumbo MFT without too much trouble. Keeping it perfectly flat over time could be a challenge.
Hope this helps. If you get to it before I do, please report back, with pics. If I get to it before you do, I'll do the same. Can't wait to stop futzing around with making new devices and get back to actually making a piece of furniture or two!
Regards,
John
