Homemade saw feed roller on the cheap

Becky Stern is a Content Creator at Autodesk/Instructables, and part time faculty at New York’s School of Visual Arts Products of Design grad program. Making and sharing are her two biggest passions, and she's created hundreds of free online DIY tutorials and videos, mostly about technology and its intersection with crafts. Find her @bekathwia on YouTube/Twitter/Instagram.

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January 21st, 2009 6

If you’ve got a couple milk crates and some fixed rollers, you can build yourself a saw feed roller for cutting long things on a table saw. It’s not clear if this one is for feeding stock in or tailing off, but either way it looks like it could use a little extra stability, perhaps you could hang a low weight from the top plane to lower the center of gravity of the whole thing. Via Milkcrate Digest.

6 thoughts on “Homemade saw feed roller on the cheap”

K says:

January 21st, 2009 at 10:08 am

Cool idea, but unless you have them lying around I have a hard time believing that buying 15 casters would be cheaper than buying an inexpensive adjustable feed roller. Adding it to a fold out/locking arm mounted to your table could be interesting though.
brk says:

January 21st, 2009 at 10:31 am

I personally prefer infeed/outfeed setups that use either casters, or the “ball bearing” style rollers. Otherwise, if you don’t perfectly align it parallel with the blade/fence, feeders like this will have tendency to drive the work one way or the other, causing binding, burning, etc.
Anonymous says:

January 21st, 2009 at 8:46 pm

How does one adjust the height? The only adjustment looks to be stacking more stuff under it. I made a set of my own rollers (using a cheap rolling pin). Then I saw how quick and easy it is to adjust the very stable store-bought ones. After considering the cost of my time and materials, along with my desire to focus on other matters, I naturally bought a pair and have been extremely happy with them.

You’ll notice that my diy shame is so complete that I am writing this anonymously.

Is there a discussion forum where people talk about the cons as well as the pros of doing things oneself? I sometimes wonder if I should feel guilty for cutting my own hair (the barber will starve!), or changing my own oil, etc. One could even argue that the entire profession of engineering, by making peoples lives easier, causes us all to be less capable. (pffff! You use a bridge?! In my day we had to swim across the river with our load of cargo! And my grandpappy didn’t believe in this high falutin’ swimming business – he did it by holding his darn breath and walking!)

Wait what was I talking about? Rollers?