Incra LS positioner or DRO for joinery

Hi,

I'm on the fence (pun intended) on wether to get an Incra fence system or to upgrade my home made self designed fence.
The home made one has micro adjust via a knob and can easily be adjusted to 0.1mm with a dial indikator and a moveable stop block and then locked in position. Also it has built in dust extraction.

Here you can see a full 3D model of it. All files available for download if anyone want a try to build something similar. Total cost was around 60-70 USD.

https://grabcad.com/library/router-t...-style-fence-1

My question - has anyone experience with doing joinery like simple box joints, though or half blind dovetails with a DRO? We all know and praise the all mighty incra, but a 5-600mm DRO is in the realms of 40 USD, whereas a new incra fence is 10 times that.

Kind regards
Anders

My new Incra LS positioner arrived yesterday. The one issue I see with this is the carriage base, it's 9 inches long and that eats up a huge portion of the router table. My router table is a cast iron 24x32 inch Sawstop. I have 12 inches from the center of the router spindle to the back of the table. Just the carriage base eats up 9 inches of that. Which I knew before ordering. I have (2) 8x27 inch cast iron extension wings I'm adding to the back of the Sawstop cast iron table. This will give me 28 inches from the center of the router spindle to the back edge of the table, which the Incra will still eat up a big chunk of that but should suffice for my needs. I could add some kind of steel outrigger to bolt the carriage base to further to the rear if I need more depth at some point.

Yes, that is a big drawback for the incra, that it overhangs the table top and cost us precious shop space.

However, my question was - do people do joinery with just a DRO?

I was thinking of generating suitable templates with pyRouterJig and having that as a guideline when setting the fence to do a cut, but in stead of the incra approach with the incremental positive stops, I would use a DRO instead.
Should yield the same result as long as I am careful when locking down the fence, right?

Anders

My DRO experience is with milling machines and metal lathes. That quality DRO's would be more accurate and a whole lot faster. Those DRO's use magnetic scales accurate to .0002 with software provisions for entering tool offsets for multiple tools, in this case router bit diameters. You can turn them off for a week and come back and it's all still there.

LARGE displays you can read from feet away. Quick access x, y, z zero buttons. If I were going to trick out a router table with a DRO I'd probably go that route.

The Incra (for a hell of a lot less money) gives me only inch/metric rules and a micro adjuster for .001 adjustments. Accuracy is limited to eyeballing the rules and pointers vs DRO accuracy. If I were doing a setup a week/month later to mill the same part it would hinge on whether I could position the Incra at the exact same ruler location I had before.

I have been thinking of ordering a 2 or 3 axis DRO of this caliber, using one access on my thickness planer, another on the table saw, so heck maybe the 3rd access on the router table. I'd have to put the DRO display on some kind of portable IV bag roller stand so I could move it around. The magnetic scales are impervious to dust, even coolant. You can also cut them to length with a saw for an exact fit, something you can't do with glass scales.

I remember the concept of “appropriate technology” from college decades ago. As both a metal worker (DRO equipped mill and lathe) and woodworker (medium sized shop with Incra on both table saw and router) I see them as different domains. (I do have DRO’s on height gauges for the planer and sander and RPM for drill press.) I toyed with the idea of putting DRO’s on the wood shop equipment and came to the conclusion that it wouldn’t be nearly as efficient as the Incra. I suspect it would end up being a PITA; I’d be chasing accuracy that just isn’t appropriate with wood. Now a big flatbed CNC router would be fun but I have neither the need nor space.

This may not answer your question, but this is life in my hobbyist shop.

I use DRO's on tools, mostly for setting tool height, some are dedicated/mounted to the machine, such as my planer and drum sander and others are hand held DRO's for setting blade or router bit height.

I have a SawStop and used the OEM fence for about 3 years, but really wanted something that would allow me to set it accurately, make my cuts, adjust the fence, make more cuts and then be able to come back to the prior setting, maybe minutes or days later.

This is when I decided to go with the Incra LS Positioner. As part of this fence change, I also decided to install a router table into the right end of the saw and it also uses the the LS Positioner fence.

I also made a personal decision to switch from Imperial to Metric as part of my 2020 New Year's resolution and converted my LS-TS Positioner to Metric. I still visualize things easier in inches, i.e. I can look at a person and estimate their height in ft/in, but in cm/mm, I need to get my phone out and use the conversion app, this is getting better with practice.

I love the LS-TS fence system, repeatability is so easy and likewise the micro adjust. As the fence has the ability to have a few scales mounted on it, I do keep a Imperial scale on it for reference, for instance, I was cutting a 1/2" Dado, as I was working with cabinet grade 1/2" plywood. I was using a 3/8" Dado set, so it was two passes. Made the first pass and then used the Imperial scale to adjust the fence that extra 1/8". Set the fence a little less and then used a couple of test passes, using the micro adjust, to creep up on the final cut width.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jim Barstow

I remember the concept of “appropriate technology” from college decades ago. As both a metal worker (DRO equipped mill and lathe) and woodworker (medium sized shop with Incra on both table saw and router) I see them as different domains. (I do have DRO’s on height gauges for the planer and sander and RPM for drill press.) I toyed with the idea of putting DRO’s on the wood shop equipment and came to the conclusion that it wouldn’t be nearly as efficient as the Incra. I suspect it would end up being a PITA; I’d be chasing accuracy that just isn’t appropriate with wood. Now a big flatbed CNC router would be fun but I have neither the need nor space.

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Ditto. That's why I have failed to pull the trigger on the higher accuracy DRO thus far. Been shopping CNC routers but again I'd have to find a use for one first and so far no luck. I'm going to give the Incra a shot on joinery.

I get that one could go nuts chasin thou' as one say.
I do not do much joinery, but would like the ability to do so.
As per now dados and rebates are a treat with this fence, but I loose track of the position when I travel past the dial indicator limit.
Easy fix: obscure the last digit with a black marker? :D

Attachment 461701

Attachment 461702

Attachment 461703

https://youtu.be/V4_kycKwIC8
Little demo of presicion.

I decided to not listen to any of you and give it a go with the DRO. :D Thank you for your input. :cool:

I plan on using pyRouterJig to make the patterns, similar to the incra master reference guide&template kit. The patterns spread out in increments of whole integers (2, 3, 4 mm), so having the pRJ template as a loose guide and the DRO as a firm indexing point to make the cut make sense, right?

DRO arrived and has been fitted to the fence. As one can see in the video there is not too much hassle to dial it in for a cut. I'm thinking that a couple of hundredths give or take is within tolerance. I have not tested the accuracy of the DRO itself, but given that it is fairly accurate I think it's a decent proof of concept.
https://youtu.be/dbdtv0ceuYk

Looks like you made a good decision for your application. The problem with the LS positioner is you can't get them. I have had one on order for SIX MONTHS.

I've had a Wixey DRo on my Unisaw and Unifence for almost 20 years. It took some effort to figure out how to mount it, but I have been entirely satisfied with the result that I get with it. I can rip a short piece of hardwood 1" wide and measure it with digital calipers to assure that it's 1" wide, and it will be within plus or minus 0.002" of 1". I can then move the fence away and make several other cuts of different dimensions, then move the fence back to 1" and cut a second piece of the same hardwood as the original. When I compare both 1" pieces, they will be within 0.003 of each other in width. I don't need better accuracy than this in woodworking.

To mount my Wixey DRO on my 54" Unifence rail I bought 1/2" square steel tubing and cut many 4" pieces from it. I then drilled two bolt holes for 8-32 bolts in one end and matching threaded holes in the under side of the Unifence rail, locating the square tubing so that it cantilevered out from under the rail far enough to attach the Wixey DRO extrusion upside down to the top of the square tubing at their ends. This positioned the DRO module correctly to allow the magnets in the ends of the DRO module to be just below the Unifence main casting. A magnetic target strip is included in the Wixey package, and I cut this in half and drilled holes in the square cut end to allow it to be bolted to the Unifence main casting, positioned so that the rounded end of it was in line with the magnets at the ends of the DRO.

Because Wixey only supplies enough of this readout extrusion for a 32" wide fence rail, I purchased an additional extrusion and readout strip so I could use the DRO on either side of the Unifence and with the fence on either side of the saw blade. Without this, if you move the fence past the blade slot you would run the DRO off the end of the readout encoder strip and rail and it will fall to the floor. So my Wixey extrusions were positioned so as not to have a joint in the most used fence positions and I cut off the excess beyond the length of my Unifence rail. This extrusion is actually upsided down to the Wixey instructions, but puts the DRO magnets in the right place to line up with the magnetic targets on my Unifence casting. Although the extrusions are upside down, the printed circuit encoder strips are placed right side up in them and positioned correctly to each other via the special spacing tool that is provided by Wixey. These strips were then also cut off at the ends of the Unifence rail. Other than a few words to myself about the thin and difficult to replace batteries in my original version Wixey DRO, it has been a joy to use. It is easy to re-zero when changing table saw blades and it has an incremental mode to help when making non through cuts at incrementing positions. One of these days I'll be talking to Wixey about a replacement DRO module with the new penlight battery size. But this is a problem that I only have to face about once a year, so other problems usually delay it every year.

Charley

Finished my LS Positioner extension, next up adding a DRO.

Attachment 462992

Attachment 462993

Why would you want both?

Charley

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Charles Lent

Why would you want both?

Charley

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Old eyes, getting hard to see a scale.