The Wood Whisperer is brought to you by Powermatic, the Gold Standard since 1921, and by Rockler Woodworking and Hardware, create with confidence. (jazzy music) The following is an excerpt from the wall-hanging cabinet Guild Build. The clip is approximately 15 minutes long, but it's just one small part of one video for this project. That should give you an idea of the depth that we go into during these Guild Builds. To learn more about the benefits and features of membership, head to WoodWhispererGuild.com. Marc:Now this bad boy is
my exact-width dado jig. I love this thing. The reason it's so great is because you don't have to necessarily worry about the thickness of the material. You use the same router setup each and every time, and you can get a dado of any width because the jig itself uses the work piece to decide the position of the jig. Basically you have your layout lines on your work piece. You slide the fence up. There's a fixed side of the jig so you line it up with your one line, and then the mobile side,
the movable side here basically take your work piece drop it in place, and then pinch it in there with the jig. Of course, you would want to clamp this to the work piece. Tighten it down. You've got two knobs on either end. Remove the work piece and now you just use a router with a guide
bushing and a router bit just a simple straight bit, or a spiral bit and you
could just plow through ride on one side and then ride back on the other side, and you'll have an exact width dado. Now we're going to cut
them using that method, but it's important that you know how to make this thing so let
me show you that process. Voiceover:So here's what you'll need, four pieces of 3/4 inch ply cut
into 2 1/4 inch wide strips, our two main rails will be 24 inches long, our long fence is 12 inches long, and our short fence is 8 inches long, a few pieces of 1/4 inch thick solid wood edge banding cut to approximately 24 inches long, and some simple bolt and knob hardware. The first step is to
glue the solid wood trim to our plywood pieces. Just make sure that each piece has solid wood trim on one side. The solid wood is
smoother and more durable and will help our jig
last for years to come. Once the trim is dry, I use an auxiliary fence at the table saw to trim it flush. The fence is nothing
more than a piece of ply with a rabbit cut into one corner. The key is to position the blade perfectly flush with the fence. I use a scrap piece of wood to help me determine when the blade
is in the perfect position. If the scrap piece moves the blade, I tap the fence over just
a hair and try again. Once the piece rides safely past the blade without the blade moving, the fence is set. Now I just run each piece through and the edge banding is trimmed flush. It's not perfect, but
it's close and it saves a lot of time. Any overhanging edge banding is trimmed flush at the miter saw. A little sanding further
smooths the edge banding making it perfectly
flush with the surface. With the solid wood edge
facing away from you lay out the slot on the short fence. Mark a line 1 1/2 inches
in from the left edge, and then another line four inches in. With the solid wood edge facing you, lay out the slot on the long fence. Mark a line 2 1/2 inches
in from the left edge, and another 5 inches in. Now when you butt the two fence pieces up solid edge to solid edge, it should look like this. Now mark a center line on the end of one of the fence pieces. This is going to help
us set up the router. At the router table I adjust the fence so that the center line of the work piece lines up perfectly with
the center line of the bit. Now I'll use my auxiliary fence to show me where my bit starts and stops. You'll see why we need this in a moment. I simply push my work
piece up against the bit, and line up the auxiliary fence with the end of the work piece and then lock it down. Do this on both sides. Now with the bit raised about 1/4 inch, I start cutting my slot. I want to stay within my lines so knowing where that bit starts and stops is absolutely essential. The process can be a
little scary at first, but watch the technique. Push the work piece against the fence and slowly slide it down onto the bit. Make the cut and then
carefully lift the piece off while pushing it against the fence. Now I raise the bit another 1/4 inch and repeat the cuts. You can keep raising the bit until it goes all the way through, but I decided that it would be safer if I simply extend my reference lines to the other face, and then finish the routing from the other side of the work piece. The movable rail piece
now needs a couple holes for the bolts so I mark in 1 1/4 inches from the edge. Since my bolts have an elliptical head, and I want to keep the head
just below the surface, I use a 1/2 inch forstner bit to create a flat-bottomed recess about 1/8 inch deep. A chisel can help fine tune the fit. Now using a 3/8 inch bit, I drill the through hole for the bolt. The next step is absolutely crucial to the accuracy of the jig. I said before that the solid wood edging was for durability, but that's only half the story. It also allows us to fine tune the edge to make sure that it's perfectly straight. So I use my straight edge to determine if there are any hills or valleys. It looks like there is a bit of a dip on one end of one of my rails. I mark the location of the dip, and then put pencil marks along the edge where I need to remove some stock. With the piece secured in the vise, I can now use my Number 7 joiner plane to joint the edge perfectly straight. I start removing the trouble area first, and then work my way back with each pass. I thought about muting the sound here because of the game in the background, but seriously the playoffs combined with the sound of a plane making shavings, if that's not paradise I don't know what is. (tv sports in background) Now when I get full shavings from one side to the other, I can check my progress again. When your two solid wood edges go together with absolutely no gaps, your work is done. Now with the two rails facing each other like you see here, we can lay out the rabbit. The rabbit is approximately
an eighth of an inch by a half inch. The dimensions aren't super critical. A straight bit in the router table makes quick work of the job. Now it's time to attach
the rails to the fence. With the two fence pieces
facing one another, line up the slots and mark the spot where the short fence ends. This is the point of
attachment of our rail. Pull the pieces apart and line up the fixed rail with the
mark on the long fence, and the end of the short fence. With the long fence clamped to the bench, I add glue to both pieces and line everything up
with a reliable square. One brad nail holds everything in place temporarily while I clean
up the glue squeeze-out. Now I can do my final alignment. When everything is perfectly square, I put in the second brad
nail to lock things down. I like to add a couple of screws for extra reinforcement, but only after the glue is set up. Make sure the screws sit below the face of the rail. Now repeat this process
for the small fence. And here's the final assembly of the jig. Insert the bolts through
the moveable rail, and then through the two fence pieces. Flip the piece over and add a washer and a knob to each bolt. Now with the jig set
up on a piece of scrap, we can make our first
vital pass with the router. This is what establishes the edge. As you can see there's a slight gap between the guide bushing
and the rabbit that we cut. This is done intentionally so that the very first pass we make, we'll trim away just a slight amount of material from the lip. But it ensures that the lip is now perfectly representative of where the bit is going to cut. Marc:Now that our jig is together, let's cut those dados. So I've got the work piece clamped to the bench here, and our jig is going to go just like so. The reason I have it overhanging is because the handles
on the bottom of the jigs stick out too far. You can't really put
everything flat on the bench. You need a little bit
of extra clearance here. So let's put that out there
as a little challenge. See if somebody can take this basic design and modify it so that
it's a little bit easier if you use on a flat workbench. Until then this should do the job. What we need to do now is take our actual work piece that's going to be this divider and put is up here, mark up the center lines, and then we'll trace the
outer edges of the shelf. I'm just going to line up my center line on my divider piece with the cabinet side center line. Once it's perfect hold
it down with one hand, take a nice, sharp
pencil and mark one side. Now just bring the jig over, and I'm going to line up my fixed portion, the fixed side of the jig, to that line that I just drew. Now I just secure the
jig with a small clamp. Now the cool part about
the jig is since we know that this rail is
perfectly square to the fence, we only really needed that one little portion of a line. We don't need to extend
the line all the way, and we also don't need a second line because we're going to
use the work piece itself to give us the measurement we need. Just basically slide it on over. Give it a good amount of pressure. You really want to squeeze
that work piece in. Tighten that bad boy down. Now I always recommend
testing on scrap first because you want to
make sure that this jig is producing the fit that you want it to. You might find that it's
a little bit too loose and you need to squeeze
these pieces together a little bit more firmly before clamping everything down. If you do have a slightly loose fit, what I would recommend
is tightening these up with the use of a clamp. Bring a little clamp in here and see if you can't just bring
those pieces together with a little bit of
clamping pressure, not a lot. If you clamp too much, you're going to have a problem. Just a little bit more than you would do with your bare hands. Once you're there tighten it down. That's pretty good. Remove the clamp, and now what you'll want to look at is when you pull this piece up, this gap that's in here is reflective of the actual fit that
you're going to experience. If this piece just pops right out with no problem, you're going to have a loose dado. If you have to sort of
pull on it a little bit before it lets go, you're in pretty good shape. I wouldn't recommend doing this too much because you can sort of
push these rail pieces out of the way if you're not careful. But you can put the piece back in and get a pretty good idea of how that's going to fit all the way across. To me, that feels like
it's going to be perfect. (router buzzing) And there it is, our stopped dado. Cut it pretty close on
the front line here, but I'm just on the line. This one still needs some work, but nothing that we can't do with a chisel and a hammer. To test the fit I've got my divider here. I won't be able to get the whole thing in because I haven't cut the divider to the proper size yet, but it's a nice, snug fit. Frankly, with just a little
bit of finish sanding on this piece, I think it's going to
slide in just perfectly. As you can see this is an extremely handy jig to have around. I've been meaning to build one for years, and I always kind of
cobble something together, but I think this one
although it's not perfect, it's close enough. I think it's one that's
going to stick with me for a while. One thing I do want to mention about it is you have to keep in mind it is sort of married at this point, not to the router. That's the reason I built it this way. I'm not worried about the router base, I'm just worried about the guide bushing and the router bit that I use. This is specifically
designed for a 5/8 inch guide bushing and a 1/2 inch router bit. It works perfectly for this. If I change the guide
bushing or the router bit, I'm going to get a different result here. But this can handle dados from I can probably just do
a simple 1/2 inch dado on up to well, as big as
I make the jig really. You can go as far as you want. So any practical size that I would need for furniture making is
covered with this jig. You may want to downsize it. You may want to make it bigger, wider, use a different guide bushing and bit combination. For me, this is what I had on hand and seems to work really well. I hope you guys will make
some variations of this and show me what you were
able to put together. (sung) By Marc Spagnuolo,
The Wood Whisperer. Voiceover:I've been
getting a lot of questions about our closing music. Most of them say something like, "What the heck is that lady saying? "It's driving me nuts." Well, here's the story. One of our biggest international fans happens to be a musician. His name is Horatio and he's pretty much the Venezuelan Kenny G only cooler. He calls himself El Saxofonista. It sounds a lot cooler though if you say it like El Saxofonista. Anyway, several months ago he sent me this great song with a very talented woman saying something that vaguely sounded like my name. Turns out she's saying,
"By Marc Spagnuolo, "The Wood Whisperer," only with a very heavy accent. While I couldn't use the song as my main intro music, I figured it was groovy enough and funny enough to
use as the outro music. Hey, it's not every day that someone in Venezuela makes a custom song for you. How can I not use it on the show? And now you know. You can learn more about Horatio and his music at Elsaxofonista.com. (sung) By Marc Spagnuolo,
The Wood Whisperer.
