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Get the Most Out of Your Shopsmith
A Shopsmith can do the work of several machines, and it can even do a few things that other machines can’t, but you need to get familiar with it to understand its capabilities. Seeing it in action will help you think like a Shopsmith owner, and will help you get the most out of your machine.
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For this project, we’re going to build a simple stepstool, something that I really need in the shop and should have built long ago. I could build this with the other tools in my shop, but I need it to be stable and square, and only my Shopsmith can guarantee those results.
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This is what it looks like without the top. You can see that it has a trestle base, which gives it a wide, stable footprint.
Part One: Building the Top
![](pics/ss/sp3.jpg) My vintage Model 500 doesn’t have the safety equipment and dust collection you’ll find on the Shopsmiths that being built today, so I generally don’t use it as a table saw. However, just to show that the Shopsmith can deliver excellent results ripping and crosscutting wood, I’ll be using the table saw function as I build this project.
Incidentally, all of the wood used in this project is leftover two by four stock that was lying around the shop.
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I’ve added an extension to the miter gauge.
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The extension makes it safer and easier to crosscut longer pieces, and a stop block assures they’ll be the same length.
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Here’s a trick I got from my dad—using the Shopsmith as a workbench. In this case, the Shopsmith works better than an ordinary workbench, allowing me to clamp from above and below.
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I can clamp from above and below, which is necessary with these bar clamps, and I can use the tables to make sure that the top will be nice as flat as possible (considering that the boards are not are not entirely straight).
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