Help required mounting a circular saw and router to y bench

[LFS19]

I don’t have a table saw and I don’t have a router table.
Cutting with the circular saw I find for the most part very cumbersome when trying to rip narrow pieces especially, and even my trusty mof97 router can be a pain and awkward to use when handheld.

Having recently built myself a work bench, I thought that maybe I could mount both the circular saw and the router on the underside of the bench.

My idea is to attach them both on the same side but at different ends of the bench, and have a singular fence that runs the entire length of the bench that can be used for both of them (which would be detachable of course). Then I’d lower the tool I wasn’t using beneath the bench so it wasn’t in the way when making a cut. Fitting the saw and router would be easy enough but what I’m not totally sure on how to do is the fence.
Obviously the body of the fence would
Simply be a straight piece of wood, but it’s how it would fix to both ends of the bench that I not sure about.
Ideally, the fence would be on some sort of rollers either end of the bench so that it could traverse the width of the bench for different sized cuts. Of course, it would also need to remain totally square to the bench when you were moving it, so presumably locked in some way.

What would be the best way of doing this? And is it even a good idea at all? Ideally it needs to be as little cutting work as possible; not because I’m lazy, but I don’t have any way to rip boards other than the circular saw and a hand saw (which I’m not yet as proficient with as I’d like to be and don’t own particularly sharp ones [and no saw stop yet to sharpen them]), hence the need for a table saw. Because the fence needs to be dead on straight, there is of course more room for amateur error the more I have to cut.

Many thanks everyone!

 

[Lazurus]

If you have a small router consider mounting it in a drill press stand and use as an overhead router. I did this for a simple job many years ago and still use it regularly, a simple MDF table and fence makes it very versatile

 

[LFS19]

When you say drill press stand, do you mean something like this?: https://www.sealantsandtoolsdirect.co.u ... gIBOPD_BwE

Or one i’d Actually have to take from an proper drill press? Because I don’t have one of those.

Many thanks!

 

[sunnybob]

turning a circular saw into a saw table is a LOT of work, with a lot of complicated and precisely measured brackets.
This is one of the best that I have seen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbAwMezmwYE
but its way too much work as far as I'm concerned.

i bought a De Walt 745 contractors table saw. Its a lot of saw for around £400 and can be moved and stored when not in use.
router tables are much easier to build though.

 

[Trainee neophyte]

I have a Wolfcraft worktable with fittings to hang a Skilsaw or router from underneath, and it is awful. Truly useless, and dangerous, and you can't even clamp things to it. It didn't help that the saw I had was a €40 special from Lidl. I am currently using it as a router table, and it is still dreadful. However, I think a lot of the problem as a table saw was the quality of the saw, if you have a good quality, accurate saw, you might be able to come up with something workable.

But! You are still going to want to use your saw as a handheld saw, but once it is attached to the table, it becomes a mission to remove it, so you don't. So you really need two saws, which means you are already a good way towards the price of a table saw. Now that I have a real table saw (from Axminster), I can tell you that the difference in the work i can do is truly astonishing, and means that I am actually doing real woodwork for the first time. From my own experience, crappy saws do crappy work, and spending the time and money to create something good means you might as well go for a factory-produced product, unless your name is Mattheus Wandell, in which case it becomes a matter of principle.

Oh, and trying to get a router adjusted from underneath a table is as fiddly as it could possibly be - real gynaecological work. Make your router table flip over to adjust, or build a lift mechanism. Do NOT waste €100 on a Wolfcraft rickety bench that claims to do the job.