Thank you Anthony, I appreciate your guidance. I'm pretty new to You Tube and am trying to give enough information so that someone can do what I have done, or develop my ideas into something better, without a lot of head scratching and without my videos being too long or slow.
Thank you Mike. It's always difficult to know how much detail to give. I usually try to give enough so someone can make my item and the reasons for choices, sometimes the result of previous difficulty.
Thank you Colin, The repair has held up well and I have used the orange top again for another jig I have made utilising that hole without issue. The temptation to get finished when really I was fatiguing was a sore lesson to learn but at least I was uninjured and the job was redeemed the following day.
I did OC and nearly bought one but in the end, I though having the accurate template would be more useful on smaller items and pieces of awkward shape.
I have done this with a jig, but would not do a whole board again but a part of it. Small screws will fall thought, very frustrating, so I would do roughly 1/2 of the plate in a L pattern :-). Leaving a closed section of the top to do fine work.
Thank you for commenting, Hans and I did indeed wonder whether I should only cut some of the holes but as the first time with an MFT, I thought I would do the sheet and then see what I used and didn't. In my bench design, the top is actually loose fitted with two "dominoed on" plywood rails locating it on the long sides within the top frame (which is a shallow torsion box) and can be lifted like an old style school desk from front or back quite easily. Also, I do tend to have a sacrificial sheet on the bench for my rail saw. There will probably be a more bespoke version 2 at some stage, when I finish my home extension.
@@AMBuilds Your approach is very pragmatic, and much to learn from you. More details on the sacrificial sheets for cutting would be of great interest to many of us, I think.
Hello again OC. Nothing exciting, I'm afraid I either just use large cardboard boxes opened out or thin 9mm OSB sheets that come as protector sheets from my timber company when they deliver higher grade sheets. At the moment I am building a koi pond and so there is not a lot of joinery going on except for cutting plastic wood sections (kedel.co.uk) and I glue and screw that with the ghastly Gorilla stuff and I don't want it on my new bench. I've worked full sheets "freehand" on a 10' x 4' bench with a large square and mechanical pencil for many years and need to break the habit and graduate to using my new MFT bench properly for square cuts and I have nearly finished a jig to fit on the new bench to crosscut up to a full sheet, which hopefully will work out to be useful and accurate.
@@AMBuilds I am interested in the detail of what you describe above. Is the shallow torsion box open on the top side? Is it closed on the bottom side? Like Hans mentioned, screws and things falling through is frustrating and I'm working on a MFT style outfeed table and wondering how to solve this issue.
Hello ro ar. Thank you for your interest. The bottom base of the bench between the end leg units is a full torsion box with solid top and bottom to create a load bearing flat surface like a chassis on an old car. Each of the plywood tool units is made with 18mm vertical sides which meant (with a little packing as appropriate) that the top of the units creates a level structural for the open upper torsion box. That box has a shallow (about 70mm, I recall) periphery and you are right, longitudinal rails at 96mm centres to coincide with the middle between the MFT holes. That box only needs minimal fixing to keep it in place and the sides of the bench are screwed to it and the cosmetic sides just short of the top of the upper box. The MFT top has two longitudinal "dominoed" rails on the underside that fit within the edges of the top torsion box and other than that is completely loose fitted. Simply lifting the long edge from one or other side and propped with a saw 400mm scrap of wood allows access to anything in the nearest 2/3 or so of the torsion box whether that be picking something up or vacuuming the slots which is very quick. Does that make sense? At the moment, we are busy trying to finish my new koi pond taking advantage of the better weather but I hope at some stage to make some short videos of aspects of the bench build that might be of interest, including this as I think it may have some merit.
An even cheaper way to generate a field of accurately spaced holes is to use peg board. Someone cautioned to carefully check for squareness of the pattern. The 2' x 4" pattern board had perfect hole registration but the pattern was 3/32" out of square relative to the long factory edge. Also, the pattern I had on hand was punched with internal fuzziness though 1/4" pins seemed to center well. When I get to town next week I'll see whether a pattern board with crisp, accurately aligned and sized holes is available. A digital calipers may be useful.
Hello Mark. I suppose it depends upon how accurate you want to be and how much use you have for the jig. Pegboard in the UK is quite a soft material and I would have thought the holes will quickly get enlarged and go out of true if only 1/4" diameter but it may do the job at a keen price for some. Thank you for sharing.
