Ever see an automated table saw fence?

Hey guys!

Over the last several years I've been working on a pet project of mine: an automated table saw fence. I do a lot of high end cabinetry work and just got tired of messing with a fence all day. Tap a little to left, now to the right, no too far, back to the left, you know the drill.

So anyway I set out to build a table saw fence that could be controlled with a keypad, could self calibrate by touching the blade, and then lock on its own when it goes to the desired width. I called it Pick-it Fence.



I designed it to fit on a Biesemeyer rail just in case I wanted to switch back. Plus I didn't want to have to drill into the table saw and deal with the hassle of fixing another rail to it so I just welded a pinion rack underneath the existing rail. I had thought about using a worm drive design but after some research I settled on rack and pinion.



After I settled on drive system I started messing with machine control. I retro fitted a keypad and relabeled the buttons then hooked it up to a seven segment display.



Of course then I needed to add some motor control:



Then I created a floating ground to make a connection to the saw blade and "zero out". On the side of the body are two flush screws that ground when they touch the blade.

I used it for a few years hoping to productize it but then the recession hit and that put me back for a few years. Fast forward to 2017 and I reached out to a product design company to fully develop it into a product. I didn't have any CAD or documentation so they pretty much redesigned the whole thing, keeping the core features the same. They kinda went all out lol:



We changed the name and did some rebranding, changed the name to Rip-it, and now we're launching on Kickstarter! Sorry I don't mean to be spammy. I'm just really excited about bringing Rip-it to life and wanted to see what you guys thought! You can see a video of it in action here: