jig saw bench or guide or other

Hi all,
what do you use for cutting panel? Yes a jig saw of course but......with guide? or fitted in to a bench? or .....
Discuss folks the quality of our boxes will increase!

Edited by: bitzo

Circular saw is better for cutting large panels.
Most of the time i cut by hand.

no guide for circular saw, only free hand?

i clamp along spirit level to wood and use as a guide

I usually borrow a school's workshop (they're really well equipped) with a circular saw, router table etc.

however, when building quickly/out of my garage/in a circumstance that won't allow me the usage of the above workshop, a cheap circular saw mounted on a jig made of old aluminium poles (think the festool thing), a heavy duty bandsaw and an array of hand saws do the job almost as well (but nowhere as quickly).

Here's a pic of a similar bandsaw (only this one is brand new and has paint on it). Bandsaws are really popular in small workshops and butchers. My used butcher's bandsaw cost me peanuts and does the job with a new blade.

The easiest option is to find a local timber merchants with a vertical panel saw and get them to cut to size for you. Failing that many forum members rate the Festool circular saw and guide rail very highly but that's a £400.00 investment. If all else fails a £50.00 circular saw and one of these will do the job.
cgi.ebay.co.uk/1270mm-Guide-Clamp-Rail-f...p1638Q2em118Q2el1247

bitzo the dewalt stuff is quality gear the circular saw comes with a side guide, ive never needed to use mine. If you plan to do a lot i would look at getting a table saw.



Quality of the cuts and accuracy is spot on every time.

we used a borrowed table saw (not dissimilar to above pic) for building a car sub box and my hifi t line sub, not as qick as a band saw or something like that but accurate and with enough space pretty easy to use

(for our rig we used our old schools workshop festooned with tools and even an air line for spray painting)

The problem with small table saws is that they are not stable enough to manage 8x4 sheets. My second point applies to ANY table saw in that you need a big workshop to use 8x4 sheets.......... if your saw is fixed then you need at least 10 foot either side to feed an 8 foot sheet thru. You're probably better off looking at the festool unless you have loads of workshop space.

For those that haven't heard of them here's a link to a Festool demo vid,