Sled for Ryobi BT3000

Tom,

The BT3000, as it was sold, didn't have a miter slot at all, so none of the jigs that require a miter slot will work on the BT3000, unless you come up with a way of adding one or modifying each jig somehow. Ryobi later came out with a narrow table for use on either side of the main table and blade, but it worked much better if you used it on the left side of the blade. I liked the idea and ordered one, but UPS kicked or towed it all the way to me, making it a heavily damaged and unuseable aluminum extrusion, so I sent it back and then made a similar design from wood with an aluminum miter slot extrusion for an insert. Both the Ryobi version and mine had the standard 3/4 X 3/8" slot so it readily accepted the standard jigs that were on the market.

What comes with the BT3000 for cutting miters is a sliding table with an angle adjustable fence, It will fit the rails on either side of the blade. The slot in this sliding table was for the T bolt and knob to lock this angled fence at the desired angle. The slot itself without the T bolt and fence is too small and too short to be very useful for anything else. This sliding table was also almost 1/8" higher than the non moving part of the saw table around the blade, making accurate cut depths of dado cuts very difficult. The blade arbor only allowed for about 1/2" max dado stack widths as well.

Another idea that I had for adding a miter slot to my BT3000 was to have the right edge of the miter sliding table machined square, and then weld or epoxy a standard liter slot extrusion to it. The miter slide table had a lock to keep it from moving at it's centered position, so if it had a miter slot along it's right edge the sliding table could be locked in place whenever using the miter slot was desired. This idea seemed good, but I never went this way because, at the time, I didn't have the machining capability or the aluminum welding capability that I have now..

The BT3000 had some very good design ideas incorporated into it, but it was also sadly lacking in some places.
Quality of construction and the lack of a good accurate miter slot being two of them. For me, the saw was also quite under powered and the blade height adjustment way too fragile. A good table saw has an induction motor and the BT3000 saw has a Universal AC-DC motor with brushes, so it screams until you put it under load and then slows to less than optimum speed for clean cuts. I couldn't tell you how many of the little timing belts that go between the motor shaft and the blade arbor that I had to replace in that saw while I owned it. Still, it was a better saw than the base models of cheap plastic cabinet table saws that were available at the time, but it was nowhere near the reliability, accuracy, and power that is available with a Delta Contractors Saw, that also had two standard and accurately machined miter slots and a relatively quiet induction motor that maintains it's speed naturally by the AC power line frequency.

Charley