Woodworking Tool News – Cadillac Coping Sled

Infinity Cutting Tools Professional Coping Sled

By Brad Holden

A good coping sled is a must for cope and stick routing.
A great coping sled is icing on the cake, and that’s what
Infinity has achieved with their industrial-quality Professional
Coping Sled. Hands down, it’s the nicest I’ve used.

A coping sled holds your work at a right angle to the
bit. When you’re routing tenons on the ends of a rail, for
example, you’d use a coping sled. The beefier it is, the better,
because routing end grain is tough work. Every feature
of the Professional sled is built on a large scale. It’s made
from 3/8" thick aluminum and weighs 8 lbs. Its base is 7"
wide, 11" long and will hold stock up to 6-1/2" wide.

Whoever designed Infinity’s sled must have coped a
lot of doors in a professional cabinet shop. The padded
handles are generously sized and angled just right. Coarse
abrasive paper on top of the sled keeps parts from slipping.
The sled has three extra-large toggle clamps. (I used
the two rear clamps to hold a backer board. This arrangement
makes it extremely easy to insert a new backer board
when I adjusted or changed a bit.) As far as I know, no
other coping sled has a three-clamp design.

Here’s one more unusual but brilliant feature: The sled
is equipped with a 3/8" thick Lexan guard plate that can
also be used as a bearing surface against your router table’s
fence. On most
sleds, the workpiece
and backer
board are all that
bear against the
fence. If both
pieces are narrow,
this arrangement
can be pretty
unstable. Infinity’s
guard plate
gives you a whopping
13" of bearing
surface.

The sled is pre-drilled for an optional miter bar. I like
using the miter bar on my router table, because it holds
the sled rock steady. I'll also use the sled and miter bar on
my tablesaw, to dado tenons.

Source

Infinity, infinitytools.com, 877-872-2487, Professional
Coping Sled, #COP-100; Precision Miter Bar – 9-7/8" x 3/4",
#COP-MB1.