A jigsaw table is essentially a jigsaw mounted upside down in a housing to allow it to be used as a kind of fake bandsaw. It’s pretty dangerous and I don’t particularly advise doing it but I needed one for a few different projects I was working on and these was before I had a bandsaw.
Here’s the full video:
A jigsaw is often used upside down, especially for neat scribe cuts and the like. In this project I made a box to temporarily house my jigsaw in an inverted position so that I could use it to cut pieces of wood that otherwise would have been too small. There’s a couple of major drawbacks of using a jigsaw table instead of a bandsaw.
- A jigsaw table generally has no support for the blade whereas a bandsaw supports the blade on the upper and lower sides through guide bearings etc.
- A jigsaw blade goes up and down whereas a bandsaw blade just goes down. That means on every up-stroke the jigsaw is trying to force the piece of wood away from the table. For this reason you need to use a standard blade that cuts on the upstroke since once the saw is inverted it’s now cutting on the downstroke.
I made the framework for the box out of softwood CLS timber and then added the base and top, both made of 18mm MDF. My Makita has pre-tapped holes in the sole plate making it relatively easy to fit in to the table using appropriate machine screws. The screw heads were countersunk below the table surface. I used this jigsaw table for quite a few jobs and it worked really well! You just have to be really careful as you don’t want a snapped blade flying off and hitting you in the face!
Last updated: 10 Dec 2016
Originally published: 10 Dec 2016
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