I own a Ridgid R4512 hybrid table saw which is a great weekend warrior saw and like many saws, the right hand side has a gap (to keep costs low and reduce weight). I was tired of having stuff constantly roll or fall off into this hole so I put together a work surface that I could mount here.

• Where we started

• Step 1: Milling 2x4s

• Step 2: Mounting this to the saw

• Step 3: Mounting the vise

• Milestone

• Mixups, Surprises and Lessons Learned

The Ridgid R4512 is a great saw for me and a very welcome step up from my previous jobsite saw (- also a Ridgid saw, the R4513). Most of the saws I was looking at ‘featured’ a hole on the right side; on bigger cabinet saws, this hole could optionally be populated with a laminate or cast-iron top, or even filled in with a router table or downdraft table. The fence, mobile-base and the saw itself wasn’t really designed for substantial weight to hang in this opening and although I had heard of some users swapping out the stamped steel wings for cast iron ones, that was outside of the budget for me. I just wanted to make something to fill in this gap that didn’t weigh or cost too much.

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I raided the lumber rack to finally use up some of the boards I’ve been holding onto for ages - some of the more gnarly boards with edge damage were chewed on by bunnies which we had years ago. The rough plan was to laminate the 2x4s together and mount a light duty vise on here (remember: the fence and saw assembly isn’t exactly built for with heavy weights in mind).

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The existing strut connecting the front and back side of the fence conveniently has holes drilled in it. The plan is to run a bolt through from the outside-in, into the worktop assembly into a captive threaded insert: this would make it easy to disassemble by just popping the bolt.

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I didn’t want to spend too much on this since I don’t generally use a vise but I wanted a vice that supported dog holes.

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Having the vise in the middle makes it tricky to apply even pressure across the entire surface of the jaws: this can be mitigated by placing the material in the middle. The bigger regret is not spending the money to get a quick-release vise: it’s a small thing (especially since I don’t use the vise that much), but it’s a huge pain to fiddle with it to open and close the jaws.

If I redid this, I don’t think I would bother with laminating 2x4s and instead would just use plywood

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