How to Make a Picture Frame Sled. Perfect Miters Every Time.

Do you need to bypass the shutoff every time you use the jig? I'd think it would trip from being even close to the aluminum.

you set the stop at 8.5 inches but said 9... did I miss something?

Love this, thanks for the vid. Side question; I notice you have a lot of audio equipment in your shop. Can you make a vid about dust collection? I assume your setup is pretty good if that equipment can live happily amongst the saws.

love this. If I was going to make frames that are 3-4 ft long, what would you recommendÉ

Finally got to use this jig yesterday , make it several months back. It worked out perfect , cuts were dialed in & this jig made it sooooo easy . Now to make your jig to glue up the frames.CHEERS!

Clever

That a KC Royals logo on your push stick?

Just found your site and love it. Very clear and easy to understand your instructions. Now I'm a subscriber, and looking forward to watching all your videos. Thank you.

Fantastic Video just bought your plans. One point of clarification please. On step 12 you state "the point of the square should align to the right side of saw kerf"- am I correct in understanding that the right side of kerf is meant to be your right as seen in the pic of you in step 12. Many thanks.
Scott

If one cut is 46 degrees and the joining cut is 44 degrees the length of the angle cut will not match the 46 degree cut will be shorter

I am struggling with getting my corners gap free, even when clamping with your picture frame clamping jig. I feel like I’ve followed your instructions well. Any ideas on what I may be doing wrong? There is no play in the sled runners, sides of frame are all the same width, both cuts are clamped while cutting. I’m guessing it’s either because it’s a cheap framing square or it’s flexing when I screw it to the sled. Any other thoughts?

After many frustrating attempts to build a picture frame with my miter saw I watched Davids super instructional and entertaining video. His presentation was clever and insightful, lots of good tips. I built his sled and it work perfectly, first time. Thanks man.

Built the sled and checked it for square. When I assemble frame and align inside rabbit on all sides the corner piece is a bit longer than the other. In other words the outside edges don’t perfectly match. Any help would be appreciated.

They make V nails for re-enforcing picture frame corners. They have a hand tool version and a press version

Yo is that an ohio hat? You from Ohio? NW Ohio here looking for woodworkers to learn from .

When cutting the rabbit is 1/2 x1/4 or is it 1/2x1/2

I'm new to woodworking and just saw your video. What a great way to perform a good job. I'm in the middle of making this sled and have a question about the location of the cut through the corner of the square. Did you cut exactly on the corner or did you offset the cut so the ruler starts at zero? I see it's been two years since you made this but I still want to say THANK YOU. I plan to watch all you video's and make the clamping jig next.

just wondering why you couldn't doit the same as table sled. Is there a reason it Can't be made that way

I just rewatched this and will be making this this weekend with my wife as she wants to start making picture frames and this video immediately popped into my head to come back to! Thanks again mate! (Also I bought a empire framing square two years ago for this very build and never got around to it 🫠)

On an aluminum square in the direction you're placing it the inches are divided into twelfths. Did you find this to be a problem when matching to measurements divided into sixteenths?

Why not just use a miter saw?

Admittedly, this is a pretty technical question... On a left-tilting saw, with the fixed arbor flange on the left of the blade (nut fastens on the right), wouldn't it make more sense to put the measurement on the left side rather than right, so that you can accommodate blades of different thicknesses without having as much affect on the measurement?

I'm about to build one of these, and my daily driver is a thin-kerf blade, which I intend to upgrade to a full-kerf in the near future, and I don't want to have to rebuild my sled. Is there any drawback to building my sled with the square flipped? This also fixes another problem I'm noticing, in which the divisions are 12ths on the right side of the square and 16ths (which I would think would be preferred) on the left. Flipping the square, it would seem, fixes both of these issues.

Am I missing something?

Holy smokes! I built this last year around this time! I love my frame sled. It took all of my frustrations out of building frames. Now everyone wants to know my corners are so perfect! It’s our secret brother😉🤣. Thank you for this tutorial!!

Just made this. Awesome jig! Be careful make sure you line up the left edge of the square up to the right side of the blade slot.

I just love your picture frame sled. Do you have a set of plans and dimensions for this sled to purchase? I have a 
Sawstop Contractor saw which is small and I am going to use the Rockler aluminum T tracks for my runners. I want to extend my tracks in the front several inches so the sled does not want to flip down. Please give me your thoughts. I love your channel. Al from Maryland.

This is great! So I had some trouble finding an aluminum framing square in my area and it forced me to think of alternatives. I ended up with a very simple solution of using 1/2 ply as the sled and a smaller rectangle of 1/2ply glued on top of it with the factory edges as the fences. I’ll eventually glue aluminum rulers to them. I routered a T track into the one side to secure the 45 angled pierce with a knob. Cheap and easy. Can’t wait to make my first frame

Actually if the square is not set at exactly 45 degrees it will not make a perfect miter joint. Even though one side might be 44 degrees and the other being 46 would add up to a 90 degree angle. It will not however match up because one side will be longer than the other when you put the joint together.

This is the first sled I have built and did it today using a cross between the original video and this video. The only part of the original video I used was the zero play slides. I already had them and didn't have 1/8" thick material to make T-slides. Yes, I could have shaved 1/8" strip of wood off of something but didn't think of it at the time. My table saw is a 10" Dewalt job site saw so there isn't a lot of table to it. The sled doesn't slide easily and tips off the back of the table as pointed out in this video. It seems like I need at least 4 hands to make the sled work as it is and that's with pushing the sled with my body; it's even harder to pull it back so I just turn the saw off and tip it up out of the tracks. I'm sure there are tweaks I can do but at this point, tweaking the slides will throw my angles off. First attempt on a frame, the angles were perfect, but the short sides ended up about 1/16" off and the long sides were about 1/8" off. I did not have adhesive sandpaper, but I do have the hold down clamps which should have held the wood in place. Thought about adding handles to help sliding the sled but would still need more than 2 hands. Now I'm thinking about splitting the sled in half and cutting away all the un-necessary plywood. Then I can load up the left side to make the first cut and switch to the right side for the second cut. I'm thinking 2 small single slide sleds should hold the angle and be easier to slide and handle with 2 hands. I'm sure if I split it into 2 sleds that over time the angle may become compromised quicker than a single sled. At some point I will build another sled using a minimalist approach on the plywood and using T-slides instead of zero play.

Made the spline jig yesterday this jig and the glue up jig are next on my list! Great job!!!!

Great stuff. One thought - you could have saved some hassle by drilling countersunk holes in the runners then affixing them to the plywood from the bottom up. Then there'd be no expansion and you wouldn't have to try to sand them back to proper width.

How big of a piece of 3/4 plywood do i need?

Just discovered this video a few days ago. I got the plans and built one yesterday. I finished it up this morning and just buzzed out an 11 x 14 frame from some southern yellow pine I had in my cutoff bin. The miters are air tight and the inside measurements were dead on. Thank you David for one hell of a jig. I have been making picture frames for a long time and thought I had a good system but this one is so much easier! No math just set it where you want it and go!

Got those chamfer bits from make it Snappy, they like to snap. The bit is not durable at all.

When you make the stop I see it slides on square and you have it screwed to stop what I don't understand is when you lock it down what keeps it for raising aluminum square up thanks Ronnie

do you have paper plans for this

Really good sled and excellent video, but the advice about not worrying about whether your blade is running at exactly 45 degrees because the two cuts will balance each other out is incorrect. I thought the reasoning and math was sound as well, but then after making it and doing a test frame I realized that by cutting one angle at 44deg and the other at 46deg, all the corner angles would indeed line up but the length of the joint on each piece will be different. The 44 degree cut will be effectively shorter than the 46 degree cut, which makes one piece hang off the end in all 4 corners. But if you take the time to square up the blade perfectly 45 degrees to each straightedge, then check the angle of the straightedges to each other to be 90 degrees, then it all works great.

So where can I buy one? Lol

Very cool! 😎🤘✊🏻

Sweet , was going to make you jig from years back ... this is even better ... ty

Design limitation…?
Doesn’t floating your guides necessitate the rabbet being always the same size?

Hi David, thank you for this. I've seen other videos on how to make a picture framing jig, but didn't grasp the fit-up until you explained it. Now I'm gonna make myself a picture framing jig! Thanks again!

Thanks for the video. One important comment. If the jig is not set up accurately for a 45 degree cut for both ends, the corners WILL make a 90 angle - however the lengths along the cut edge will be DIFFERENT for the cuts. The result will be that if the inside corners are matched up, the outside will be slightly off. On the other hand if you clamp using the outside corners, the inside won't match up precisely. For small angular errors, and narrow framing stock, it will be much less noticable. If you might use wide frames, you will want to get the 90 deg angle between the left and right cut accurate AND you want both left and right cut to be 45 degrees.

I just made this sled and it has made exactly 0 square frames. I have no idea what is going wrong other than the fact the first cut on the short side isn’t 45° and the cut taken on the longer side of the jig is also not 45° which makes me believe that the sled needs to be cutting into the sled at a perfect 45° for this to work…..

This video was super helpful, making mine this weekend. Thank You!

Any tips for when your frames have to be really big? Like for 50" wide artwork?

I like this approach for frames. Using the aluminum square for this was brilliant. I must add to my collection.

Now that I’ve made the jig, I realized it’s slight imperfection at the 45° cut into the carpenter square. In making my first frame, the inside dimensions are short 1/12”, Empire is in 12th🤦🏻‍♂️. I should be able to salvage the frame by trimming off 1/12 the frame insides. Just a friendly shout out to your viewers and subscribers to re-measure to catch any variance. Am just a retired banker toiling away as a weekend warrior on a fold away Ryobi table saw.