Homemade siding/soffit cutoff saw

[JDgreen227]

I do a lot of vinyl siding and aluminum soffit work as a sideline, and being too cheap to buy a sliding compound miter saw, I made two of these using an old Craftsman 2 hp circular saw for the powerhead. The blade used is a fine tooth steel type running in reverse so it abrades the material being cut. The saw will crosscut about 22 inches maximum. It rides on a pair of aluminum angles that slide along the stainless steel tracks. My brother has the other one, he loves using it.

Anybody else have something like this?

 

[simonds]

Looks great. Good job, It should wok well. Blade doesn't look like a fine tooth but that's ok. When we do soffitt we just use the framing blade that we were using previously, and it works fine. Just go slow and any blade works. Sure is better than using shears.

 

[zukota]

We've been doing it that way for years. Just take the blade (fine teeth is better) and run it backwards.

 

[2manyrocks]

The Habitat house building book shows how to build a wooden jig to cut vinyl. I've seen a jig similar to yours for cutting granite with a wormdrive saw outfitted with a water drip on the blade. Always made me nervous due to the shock hazard.

 

[kub32guy]

I had a similar jig except the jig was all wood and the saw was makita with the guard tied up with a piece of shoe lace. May I suggest extending the right side of the table, then you can make a mark for cutting many pieces of the same size. Very handy for soffit, beats pulling out a tape measure for every piece.

 

[JDgreen227]

I had a similar jig except the jig was all wood and the saw was makita with the guard tied up with a piece of shoe lace. May I suggest extending the right side of the table, then you can make a mark for cutting many pieces of the same size. Very handy for soffit, beats pulling out a tape measure for every piece.

I removed the lower blade guard as the saw is used only for the jig and nothing else. For cutting a lot of identical size sections I turn the saw 90 degrees to the folding table and clamp it down, then clamp a 4X4 post section to the table as a stop for whatever length is needed.

About 15 years ago I made one of these differently where the saw itself rode on a pair of tracks from a file cabinet, it was one assembly but had limited crosscut capacity. My brother's garage was burgled last summer and that saw was stolen. It's shown in the pic here.