I finally got around to putting a folding outfeed table on my table saw. I’ve had this thing for over 3 years now, and an old Ryobi before that. This whole time I’ve been using either work supports or my rolling assembly table as my outfeed. I can’t believe I waited this long! I found a lot of good ideas on how to do this from searching the web, so I can’t say the design is all mine. However, I wanted it to be cheap, so I am using mostly scraps for it, although the table top is a pretty large sized scrap of Baltic Birch by most standards.

This is a pic of the mostly finished project. I have cut 3/4″ slots to line up with my miter slots on the table saw, and put 1 coat of boiled linseed oil (BLO) on it. I really like the color and depth that even 1 coat brings out.

This project started by finding the simplest way to attach, which in my opinion was to use standard door hinges on the back fence track. There is a slot underneath that easily accepts 5/16″ bolts.

There is a 2″ drop from the top of the table to the hinge, so I chose to use 1.5″ of wood to screw into, plus a 1/2″ baltic birch plywood top. This brought me right up to the same surface as the cast iron top. No fine tuning needed. If you need, though, a tiny pocket routed into your lumber could easily adjust this height if you happen to be less than 2″. I chose to laminate 2 scraps of plywood to make my 1.5″ board, then screw the Baltic Birch top onto that.

With the boards glued up, and a quick test fit, the length looked fine. I took it about 1.5″ inches from the floor by spacing it up with some scrap 2×4’s. Everything seemed to work fine, so I put 2 screws into each corner. The BB top is not glued in place, only screwed. I could remove/replace this top in the future if it gets really beat up. You can see I chose to use 3 hinges to attach to the aluminum rail. No calculations here, it just looked strong enough.

I ripped some other scrap plywood to a 1.5″ thickness and pocket screwed this to the perimeter to give the 1/2″ top some stiffness without adding a ton of weight.

Underneath, I also glued in 2 additional pieces of 3/4″ plywood to be in-line with the miter track slots. I wanted these here because the miter slots will be a minimum of 3/8″ deep into the 1/2″ birch top. In case I want to go deeper, there is already a support there to cut into. It also gives a good spot to attach the hinge for the support leg.

The support leg is a piece of Oak that was going to take a LOT of planing to clean up, so I used it for this. I wanted the strength of oak instead of plywood here. I slotted the oak and a mating piece of scrap plywood so I would have some adjustment.

Right now the leg is a fixed length once the bolts are tightened. I think I’m going to add a hinge with a lock in the middle to make everything fold away nicely, but for right now this is working. The support leg just sits into an L shaped wooden bracket I bolted to the base of the saw.