I also like the push stick design

Nice additions.

I agree, those little plastic sleds that come with saws are usually pretty bad. That's one reason why I made this sled.

I simply made it longer at the back and screwed a piece of wood underneath as the stop

Thanks!

If you set your band saw blade so that the teeth are at the crown of the wheel you may avoid your problem.

It's a Craftsman but Rikon makes an identical model or maybe it's the other way around.

Me too! That would be soo nice.

That's probably a common mistake but the sled would still work there just wouldn't be anything supporting one end of whatever was being cut. This may or may not be an issue.

I cut maybe 1/2" into my sled's fence. Not on the first try, but after a lot of use. So I made an adjustable stop that attaches to the front of the sled. It arrests the sled when it hits the front of the table. But even that was not enough, because this whole thing was removeable. And after I got used to using it with the stop, I had some even worse accidental overshoots when I forget I was not using it. So I while I still had enough meat left in the fence, I drilled a hole in it and glued in a piece of 3/8" hardened steel rod, directly in the path of the blade. Ultimately I see it as a safety feature, in case I were to somehow forget I wasn't using the stop, and I somehow had my thumb behind the fence in the path of the blade. But also, logically speaking, it is faster and easier to change the blade on my bandsaw than to build a new sled. And I'm such a cheapskate, that I should be much more careful with the sled if I knew it could damage my blades. The steel pin does the job. In many years since then, I have only thrown a few sparks off it, once, not so bad that the blade was ruined.

It would be an act of extreme carelessness to cut the sled entirely through. Maybe a sign that such a person shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a bandsaw! However, some kind of adjustable stop would be simple to make and would enable accurate and repeatable cross cuts to a precise depth of cut. The downside of that would be that people who would otherwise cut their sled in half would continue using their bandsaw until they'd done something equally careless and perhaps more devastating.

Ron Tocknell Depends on what you're doing and on how thick the fence is. Maybe you're cutting hundreds of lengths of stock to the same dimensions (brass round? pvc pipe? Slim Jim's?), using a stop block clamped to the fence as reference. The sled allows you to keep your hands and thumbs well away from the line of the blade on this hypothetical cut, so you are free to develop a rhythm, once you have figured out all the important safety checks for each potentially dangerous successive cut. This rhythm you develop has some inverse relationship between attention and accuracy. And after you figure out all the important safety bits and consequences, it so happens to turn out that the only reason accuracy matters at all is to avoid cutting the stock only partway and/or cutting the sled in half. So you maybe develop a balance that is biased towards speed and minimal effort while being just careful enough to not cut the sled completely in two. And maybe in the middle of this batch of hundreds of cuts, you changed the blade. And maybe you haven't gotten the tracking and thrust bearing dialed in quite as well as you thought. The blade has a bit more bounce when it finishes the cut. So the rhythm or technique you developed results in a deeper follow through. Your process is holding up. You were in no danger of physical harm. All the cuts are good. But now the sled is hanging on by a thread. You can probably finish the rest of this job, just fine. But by the looks of it, the second time you try to put the sled up and back, it is going to fall apart. And it could be dangerous if the sled were to come apart in halves while you were using it. As you might see, the stop is not just useful for making repeatable blind cuts partway through the stock. (Although this is a nice feature for making half laps and tenons.) It is also very useful for making regular cuts. Along with preventing you from damaging the sled, it can increase your efficiency and productivity by reducing the amount of wasted movement and reducing fatigue and error. But you make a good point about safety. This is the reason that after I made the adjustable stop, I also embedded a piece of hardened tool steel inside of the fence. Regular band saw blades can't cut through it.

Not on the first try.

The problem with gloves is that they can get caught in moving parts.