Our Mitre Sled can be used with a range of different cutters provided they have bearings mounted into the shank below the cutting blades. In this article, we show a few cutter options for the Mitre Sled, introduce a custom cutter pair for interlocking mitres and look at some other off-the-shelf cutters for making boxes with more than 4 sides.
My favorite cutter for the Mitre Sled at the moment would have to be a 1/4 inch shank spiral cutter with bearing and collar. This cutter only has about 22mm long blade, but produces the best finish particularly on small detailed work.
Next on the list is our standard 1/2 inch shank, 38mm flush trim cutter typically used on the Mitre Maker. This cutter is great for thick boards that the spiral cant handle or when using a spoil board underneath your work. I normally take a few passes with this cutter so as to not burn the timber by taking the cut too slowly.
During Mitre Maker product development, we had a pair of custom cutters made up to facilitate cutting an interlocking mitre joint. These cutters take a flush bearing on the 1/2 inch shank and include one cutter to cut the tongue and a matching cutter to cut the groove.
These matching cutters work really well on the Mitre Sled but are limited in range of timber thickness that they are able to accommodate. However, they are perfectly suited for 8-12mm boards typically used for box making. The resulting join using the interlocking cutter pair is shown below.
For boxes with more than 4 sides, you will need to work out the internal angle and find a cutter with an angle to match. For example, for a 6 sided box, the internal angle is 120 degrees, but with a straight cutter on the Mitre Sled we can only get to 90 degrees. Therefore we need an additional 30 degrees in the corner joint which is achieved with 15 degree bevel on the cutter. 15 degree bevel cutters are readily available like this example from Carb-I-Tool.
Similarly for an 8 sided box, a 22.5 degree bevel or chamfer bit with bearing mounted on the shank will cut the correct angle.
