Fortunately, there are many options for suitable floors in a horse facility. The most suitable floor is highly dependent on management style, while personal preferences can have a strong influence. The fitness of a horse's legs and feet can be greatly affected by the type of stall flooring chosen. Make test cuts first!īy the way if you do cut your own slats and you are leaving the grid bare, another thing to consider would be gluing a thin piece of some other kind of wood to the top and bottom of your board before slotting and slicing, if you want a nice contrasting trim on the edge of the slats.The importance of good flooring becomes more evident as a horse spends more time in his stall. Slightly too shallow and you won't be able to stick your horizontals and verticals together without recutting. Slightly too deep you can still create a nice flush grid and glue will still hold fine. The former (slot board then slice slats off) would be a bit trickier.īy the way I would err on the side of cutting your slots slightly too deep rather than too shallow. With appropriate clamping the latter (cut all slats at once) could be done with a buzzsaw, you'd have to be creative if you wanted a spacing jig. The same slot spacing jig can be used if you do it this way, too. Cut first slot, then place it over the tongue piece and cut the next, and so on to get quick evenly spaced slots.Īlternately, like rob's answer says, if you already have slats you can clamp or double sided tape them together to cut the slots with a table saw in all of them at once, as with cutting the pre-sliced board above. You can keep the slots evenly spaced with a jig of some sort with piece of something on it that fits in the slot and is the size of one of your grid cells away from the blade. If your table saw blade is too narrow use a dado set or make multiple passes per slot. This will minimize the number of cuts you have to make and also lets you cut your slat widths to whatever you want to match your slot widths. Watch out for kickback (or just aim your table saw in the direction of your pile of slats, heh). Then once you have cut all the slots use the table saw to slice your slotted board into thin slats. imagine cutting horizontal slots in a 2x4. If you have a table saw you could use it to cut slots halfway deep in a larger board, e.g. As far as I know, no sliding miter saw is designed to be used with a dado blade of any kind, so cutting the slats on a sliding miter saw will require multiple passes to cut the width of a slat, unless working with very thin material.īoth the horizontal and vertical slats will be the same shape if your slots are halfway deep. If you have a sliding miter saw, you can work similarly to a radial arm saw, but the blade cuts as you push it back instead of as you pull it toward yourself. You have to be especially careful since a radial arm saw is configured to make a climb cut. You can also use a radial arm saw with a dado set-it works in a similar fashion but you cut from the top instead of the bottom, and the blade moves instead of the workpiece. Ideally, you would use a crosscut sled on a table saw with several slats aligned and clamped together. Keep in mind that on a 10" table saw, the common dado set sizes are 8" and 6", which will limit your depth of cut. If you want to make a cut to exactly the right width in one pass (up to a limit), you can use a dado set (available in either a "wobble" blade or the more common stacked dado set) to cut to the exact width of your slats, and the blade set to exactly half the height of your slats. With a looser fit, the grid will be more prone to racking. cutting the slots slightly wider than the slats. Yes, this is a great way to make such a grid, although you want the joints to be as tight as possible vs.
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