Félix Gómez Martín sent me photos of his multifunction cutting table from Seville. Depending on his carpentry project needs, he installs a handheld circular saw, a router, or a jigsaw.
As is clear in the photos, he put a lot of work into making it and didn’t skimp on details. One of the things he focused on the most was installing aluminum rails with aluminum profiles sliding inside. If you have searched for aluminum profiles that fit perfectly inside each other (I have searched for them), you may have experienced, like me and Félix, that you can’t find profiles that fit into each other no matter how many you try. But Félix was determined that there had to be a way and found a solution:
The solution was to buy a flat profile of 35 mm and square profiles of 10×10 mm. I placed one on each side, fixed with rivets underneath the flat profile, which is attached to the table. Consequently, the guide running through the rails is a 15-millimeter “U” (35-10-10=15 mm). Everything is aluminum, as you can see in the photos. More than anything, it was a stubbornness of mine to do it in aluminum. Until I found this solution, I went around “like a dog looking for a place to lie down,” searching everywhere for something that fit and didn’t exist anywhere.
The first time I saw the photos, I thought it couldn’t be easy to rivet the square profiles to the aluminum plate, but it seems that with a bit of patience and doing things little by little, the result is quite satisfactory.
As for whether it was complicated to rivet it, I’ll tell you it wasn’t, but it was laborious. To fix the square profiles to the plate, the best and easiest way to adjust them without play is to first fix them with a bit of contact adhesive and then, when dry, start riveting. To leave the rivet heads flush with the lower surface of the aluminum plate, I made the corresponding countersinks.