Circle Jig on the Bandsaw

I've got a project I'm working on it's a table, and I've got a cut big round top. So I wanna take a second and show you the circle cutter that I would use to cut a perfect circle every time. Made this myself, so it's a shot made circle cutter, got a couple of things going forward here. Now, look at the bottom of it, here on the bottom there's a cleat. This cleat is gonna end up up against the edge here on my band saw table.

Another cleat back here. This one has got a threaded knob into it. When I tighten this knob it tightens against the dovetail slider I'm gonna show you in just a second. So, obviously the cleats are also helping to hold the two halves of the jig together. Now this dovetail slider is here.

So the end is actually cut in a dovetail shape. When I loosen the knob in this cleat, I can slide this back and forth that lets me adjust for different radii. So when this goes onto my band saw it slips over the table and remember that cleat hits the table, so it's up against it there. I'm gonna slide my pivot point as close as I can to the blade, and then look down through here to eye it up. What I wanna do is get the center of the pivot point at the very front of the bandsaw blade in order for this to work correctly.

Then I can reach under here and lock that cleat right to the bottom of my band saw table and we should be set. I'll do a test cut first just to make sure it's cutting a circle correctly. If your front to back adjustment is just a little bit off then the circle is not gonna cut perfectly. So sometimes you're gonna need to do a test cut, tweak this position just a little bit and then correct it before you go on to the real circle. In order to make a cut, I need to drill a hole in my piece that'll sit on that pivot point right there.

So I've got a quarter inch hole, matches the quarter inch dowel. This is what I use when I do larger circles like this, on smaller diameter circles on this end of the jig I've just got a screw tip poking through and you can rest small circles on that. But I find that in bigger circles, it's better to use the quarter inch dowel and a quarter inch hole, it engages better so they're not likely to jump off the circle cutter on you. So I'm gonna get that in position. Get it close to the blade, it's not pushed right up against the blade.

Lock this down and we'll see how this test cut goes. That worked out great, circle cut very well. Like I said, sometimes you have to make small adjustments in the circle cutter position to get it to cut just right. Once this is correctly set, I can slide this to any position I want in order to make the final cut. So now I'm ready to actually do that big tabletop I was talking about.

I've got the hole drilled in the bottom of my tabletop. I've done one other thing to get started, I've cut a notch here. That's so that when I start making my circle, when I first start cutting, there's a spot here for the blade to sit inside instead of starting out here on the outside of my material, this way I'll get a perfectly round circle. So all I need to do now is get the dowel seated into that center point. This is the hardest part of the whole process, just finding that hole.

Then I can gently bring the slider in, that notch is gonna completely capture the blade. Now the diameter of my circle is determined by the distance from my pivot point, here at someplace, to the bottom of that notch. So that would be the radius and of course, two times that would be the diameter. So we're all set to go here, get this tabletop cut out. There we go, we got a perfect circle.

Much easier than using a compass and drawing a circle and trying to do it freehand. I've used this shot made circle cutting jig for everything, from table tops, to bowl blanks, it works great. Hope it works well for you too.