52 - Miter Spline & Dovetail Key Jig

[Music] hi my name is james welcome to king's fine woodworking today i'm going to show you how to build a spline jig but it's more than that because it will also cut slots for dovetail keys and it's got some built-in clamps to help cut picture frames and dovetail keys more safely i had a long thin piece of purple heart that i really didn't have another use for so i thought i would turn this into the miter bar this is the piece of wood or aluminum that's going to ride in the miter slot that's going to connect to the jig and allow us to get straight cuts after planing it to thickness i cut it to the exact width for the miter slot and if you end up cutting it a little bit big you can actually sand it a tiny bit to fine tune it and it looks like this one's going to fit pretty good i did actually have to sand it and cut it a couple of times to get it down to perfect if you want to avoid that you can certainly buy an aluminum miter bar and i'll have a link to that in the description but here again if you prefer to make one you certainly can you need to use a hard hardwood something like hard maple would work nicely most exotics also work well and once i've got that out of the way i actually compiled all of my used up scraps of baltic birch plywood to see what i had and looks like i have more than enough to make this jig from today so if you think back to what the jig looks like the two main boards that make up the bed which carry the boxes and other things that we're going to cut are beveled at 45 degrees so i've set the saw at 45 but i also just want to check it with my gauge here it's important to me at least that i have a very accurate 45 degree angle if it's not perfect things will work fine anyhow but you might see that with your mitered splines maybe a little bit deeper on one side of the box than the other so i just take the time to set it up accurately to begin with once those are cut i need to cut a few of these triangular supports which are going to hold this bed in place on top of the base of the jig when they're all cut it's time for some assembly here so it might look just a little bit confusing now but in a minute or so everything will be clear in addition to keeping this square as i'm clamping it down i also want to make sure that the bottom of this triangular support lines up perfectly flush with the bottom of the miter cut because those are going to sit on top of the jig and i want those to be seated nicely so i'm just going to use a scrap block of wood you could use a ruler whatever you like just make sure that those are both lined up and in the same plane we'll just repeat that process for the other two triangles and then i basically let it sit for a few hours and dry once it was done i took the clamps off and the first thing i'm going to do is to set it flat on a cast iron surface and make sure that it's nice and flush we did make two of these because the two of them combined make our 90 degree edge and that one looks like it lines up really well so now we're going to go ahead and glue them down onto the bottom piece of our jig i don't know if you notice here but the bottom of our jig there's a little bit of a warp in it this board has been sitting in my shop for a long time it's pretty mild so i'm just going to use a clamp to take out the warp and maybe put some weights on there as well now of course the clamp and the weights themselves aren't going to take out the warp but because it's very mild warp i'm going to clamp it down and weight it down so it's perfectly flat on my cast iron surface and then i'm going to glue the two pieces of the bed on to the bottom here and i think once that glue is dry yes that is a gigantic four inch nut there i don't know why they have them that big but one of these days i'll find the bolt for it sorry anyhow once this dries i think it's going to probably keep the bottom flat so we'll find out how that works out as you know you must use lots and lots and lots of glue so if you'll notice there's a pencil mark there i'm lining up with this pencil mark the pencil mark is a straight line which is equidistant from the edge and that's just going to kind of be my center datum line for me to line this whole thing up and i'm going to shoot in a few pin nails to hold it in place while it dries after drying overnight i'm going to take off the weights on this side i'll leave the clamp on for now but i'll take off the weights and go ahead and glue the other side down and i'll let that dry and then we'll check it and see how that warp works out it does look like we have achieved a perfect 90 degree angle there and that's great that's just what we're looking for the cool thing about this jig is it's a really quick and easy project except for the glue having to dry it probably took about two hours to build the whole thing and it makes just fantastic joints and it's such an easy way to create boxes and glue boxes together and you don't have to pull out a dovetail jig you don't have to learn how to cut dovetails you don't have to know anything fancy really and it makes really beautiful joints if this is something that you'd like to build i do have the a complete set of 3d plans available for them and there is a link to those in the description okay so it's time to put the miter bar on what i'm doing is i'm putting a washer a few washers down there maybe one washer thick to just barely elevate this miter bar above the surface of the table saw that way i can glue it in place to get it held in temporarily until i get some screws on but if it were down below the surface a little bit too much then it wouldn't be high enough for the glue to make contact with the wood and it wouldn't work out so a good trick for that is put some dimes or put a couple washers or something like that down then i use ca glue i do have a link to this in the description as well this is a glue that everybody should have in their shop it's good for quick and easy projects like this it's instantaneous it sets within seconds uh there's even an activator to make it set faster than that so i basically put this in place put that down i'll let it sit for a few seconds then i can lift out of there and go to work once that has been frozen in place i'll go ahead and lift the jig out and then i can go ahead and drill it and put in some screws i'll drill a small hole first all the way through then i'll follow that up with a countersink bit so that when my screws go in the heads are below the surface and we just got to make sure the screws the right length to not go all the way through the sled once that's done i've given the bottom a light sanding and i'm going to apply a thin coat of paste wax i'll let it dry and i'll buff it off i'm also going to do the same to the cast iron surface of my table saw i'm using paste wax here uh instead of my normal stuff which is bostick's glidecoat i like glidecoat quite a bit but i ran out about a week ago so pastebacks is a pretty good substitute it doesn't last quite as long but it's going to give me a slick surface here and just a quick check to make sure it moves smoothly back and forth [Music] okay so next i will need to make the clamps this is just two three three-dimensional sort of blocks that are going to go on either side of the jig one on the left side and one on the right side of the box or the picture frame or whatever it is i'm trying to put the splines into taking the time to square up one edge here before i cut the block to size that way i know my block is perfectly square that's going to be important so that it fits in the jig nicely and there's no wobble okay well i said i'm taking the time but it's actually my daughter and she's also taking her time to cut a scoring cut through the top of this before slicing all the way through it that's going to prevent tear out at the top of this plywood and just make it look a lot nicer to assemble these i'm just going to use glue and pin nails to hold it together you should take note how i'm going to use this pin nailer i'm going to use my thumb and finger to line up the joint to feel that it's perfect but before i squeeze the trigger i'm going to move them out of the way sometimes these nails go sideways through the boards and you don't want to get stuck we are making a total of two of these clamps there's going to be one going on either side of the box that we're going to hold down and once they're done i'll just take my random orbit sander knock off all the corners and smooth it up a little bit so we don't get any splinters while we're handling it and kind of get a feel of how these go on the jig to hold the box in place so next i realized at this point i have forgotten to put in a slot to hold my t-track this is one of those silly things that happens when i'm so focused on filming the project that i accidentally do a step out of order so i'm going to put in a spacer block here i'm going to use that as an edge guide for my router in order to cut a slot to hold the t-track ideally i would have cut the t-track maybe on my table saw or even on my router cable or with a handheld router for that matter but i would have cut it before i assembled all of this and i didn't so i'm trying to uh to make up for what i messed up [Music] once i've got the slot plowed out there i'm going to sand off the rough edges of it and you can get the t-track in different sizes i usually get longer lengths of it because it ends up being cheaper per foot that way and just cut it to whatever length that you need on the chop saw aluminum cuts really well on the chop saw we just cut it a little bit slower than we would cut wood so it doesn't give it a chance to heat up or melt or anything like that but it cuts just fine doesn't damage the saw blade at all the edges are usually a little bit rough after coming off of the saw and we don't want to get scraped on them or cut on them so i just use a file and go over the edges a little bit t-track usually fits perfectly with a three-quarter inch router bit if you use your dado you might want to do a test cut first to make sure you get it just right now i have to remove the evidence of my mistake there [Music] so i'll need to drill a hole before i put the screws in and i'm going to use this vix bit vix it's a self-centering drill bit it's kind of shaped like a countersink at the end and it will allow me to drill a hole right in the dead center of the hole uh for the end of the t-track so the screw goes right in the middle those are very useful to have for hinges especially when you need high precision so now i'm going to put my clamp my wooden clamp back in place and i'm going to mark where the dead center of that t-track is on it and that's going to allow me to drill a hole through the wood in order to put a bolt through and clamp this thing down so i realize i've been calling this thing a clamp the whole time it actually functions as much as a stop block as it does as a clamp it acts as a stop block so that we can put our piece that we're cutting up against it and have a consistent stop but they also work as a clamp which i'll demonstrate later when we're building this because they will essentially hold your piece solidly or tightly when you're making cuts especially with when you're making dovetail cuts on the router and we'll just slide our t-track bolt through there and a star knob and that's how we will lock this piece down in place here i'm going to make the first cut through the jig now i could cut all the way through there'd be no problem if i wanted to because the two 45 degree pieces of the bed will certainly hold this structure rigid but since i don't have to go all the way through i generally don't on these jigs i stop an inch or two short from the end and another thing that i like to do is run a pencil mark up on either side of that kerf to let me know exactly where the blade path would be and i'll show you how that helps out here in a little bit so i'm going to make a sample cut now and we'll show you how it works i like to raise up my blade with a box a sample box in the jig and stop it anywhere from i don't know an eighth to three sixteenths uh from going all the way through we don't necessarily want that spline to go all the way through then i'm going to hold the marks that i've made on the box right up with that pencil mark i've made and i'll run my stop or clamp board here up to that and then i'll lock it down and i'll just make sure that i keep my box up tight against that block on the right hand side and that'll help me make all of the cuts uniformly okay so once the first cut goes all the way through we just back the sled up and then we rotate the box 90 degrees to cut the next slot and you can see that one lined up nicely where we wanted it there and they'll all be in the exact same location if we just keep rotating them and holding them up up against that stop block i think i measured to have those splines about one inch up from the bottom and i also wanted to set one inch down from the top so once these four are cut i'll just take that box rotate it over 180 degrees like that and then i'll cut the four on the other side and they'll be the exact same distance away from that side that these ones were from this side when that's done i'll have to lift the box up i'll have to unclamp my stop block there move it over to the right i'll do my same technique i did the first time i'll realign the pencil mark to where the kerf cut is try to keep it in the center clamp my stop block back down and then i can go ahead and cut the last four splines okay so the splines are 1 8 of an inch thick because that's the thickness of the kerf of my blade and i'm just going to take a piece of purple heart and set my fence at about 1 8 of an inch and i'll go ahead and cut a test spline and see if it fits in [Music] so the first one seemed to fit okay so we went ahead and cut a batch of them on second fitting though my daughter sai was trying to fit them in they seemed a little bit tight and that's probably the ideal situation if they're a little bit tight then we can just sand them down a tiny bit and they'll fit better here i'm just going to kind of mark them a little bit long a little bit bigger than what they need to be so that i can cut them into pieces on my bandsaw at this point all we need to do is glue it up get glue on both sides of the spline get glue in the slot and put them together okay so now i'm going to show you how we cut the splines into a picture frame it's very similar we're going to mark a location on the frame and line that up with the pencil marks on the jig bring the stop block into place and now is when the second stop block comes in handy we're going to put this one in slide it all the way over and here it's going to act like a clamp to hold this picture frame still since the frame might wobble a little bit and it's a little bit harder to hold because it's thin and i don't want to have my hands down near the blade i'm just going to use the two stop blocks to act like a clamp and make my cuts that way i don't know if you notice there the picture frame just bounced up a tiny bit you do have to make sure you hold that picture frame down while you're making the cut because these clamps obviously aren't that strong you could clamp them together but not really necessary if you hold it down and it's pretty much the same as the box that's what those look like so for these i'm going to cut some maple splines and we'll do it exactly the same way what's nice about the spline jig is that obviously you can cut splines of a contrasting color which makes for an attractive looking piece when it's done splines also greatly enhance the strength of whatever you're gluing together in situations where you have miter joints connecting and only the miter joint that is an ingrained glue joint which is very very weak if you put splines in it significantly increases the strength and of course adds a really nice aesthetic look so we'll just set that aside to dry and we are going to take the jig over to the router table so pretty much all router tables are going to have miter slots in them the miter slot on mine happens to be a couple of inches closer to the blade or the cutter than the one on my table saw which is no big deal so the first thing that i'm going to do here is i'm going to take a three-quarter inch router bit and i'm just going to cut a clear path through the jig in order to allow my dovetail bit to come in and cut unobstructed that way i can use different heights with the dovetail jig as need be so the procedure here is actually exactly the same i realize now it's looking a little different because my daughter is putting the left side stop block in first and in the last clip i put the right side stop block in first really makes no difference we're just going to line up the pencil mark with the center of where the dovetail cutter is going and put one of the stop blocks in place we have to follow up and put the other stop block in place and bring it up real tight against the first one that's going to hold this board or this box actually snug so that it can't shift left to right in here and we'll have a nice clean dovetail cut kind of trying to use my air gun to blow the dust out of the way so that you can see the cut but then i realized you not really able to see the cut anyhow but now you can see it there it is the dovetail cut some fibers tear out there but it does not ever tend even though there's no backer it doesn't ever tend to tear out the board itself which is nice and once again it's just the exact same procedure we'll make a cut rotate the box 90 degrees and make the next cut proceed till all of them are done then we'll just flip it over infringe and cut the other [Music] side so most people are probably thinking at this point well that was easy but the hard part's coming up and that just isn't true you just take a board of any thickness that you want you set your fence so that you cut a portion of the dovetail there through it and so you end up with something that looks sort of like a dovetail you have to make sure the height is correct but that's pretty easy to measure and then you cut it you do a test fit if that's not it you just move it in a little bit closer and cut it again it took us three cuts to hit it and took about five minutes to dial it in it's really very very simple to make these cuts this is something that absolutely anybody can do with no experience whatsoever you need to be a little more comfortable with a router and have a little bit of experience in order to cut a dovetail with a dovetail jig but cutting these doesn't really take any woodworking experience once that's done we'll take this over the table saw and we'll just go ahead and cut that dovetail key right off so with the dovetail key i'll go ahead and insert it into the slot here i'll make a mark so that i can cut it a little bit longer than it needs to be exactly the same procedure i did with the with the miter spline pieces as well we'll cut these on the bandsaw and we'll just glue them in so if you're like us and you use exactly the right amount of glue it might take you a second or so to clean up the excess once these things dry and it doesn't take long i probably let this sit for 30 or 45 minutes then i just went ahead and cut off the splines and i'm going to sand them down to flush so i just want to point out something that you might have noticed here when i cut these splines i didn't the the wood that i had wasn't really wide enough so they're actually just short of the corner i knew that was happening but i went ahead and left it like this so i can kind of show you what i do to fix it it's really simple i just kind of sand the edges off i put a little bevel on the edges and i'll bring the the maple down to the edge of that purple heart if you catch this when you're when you're cutting the splines or or something you can actually cut a shallower uh kerf for the spline piece itself or you can just get a wider board for the spline otherwise you're going to have to chamfer those corners to make up for it same thing for the dovetail keys i'll just cut them off and sand them flush in fact i probably could have spent about five more minutes looking for my flush cut saw instead of this dovetail saw with a back on it and i would have had a much nicer cut but that's okay i've got some aggressive grit on my sander here and i can fix it that way [Music] and that's really all there is to it with one jig you can make quite a number of different decorative joints you can even make some nice dovetails use some contrasting woods for accent you can do a lot of a lot of good things with this jig i'm going to wipe some denatured alcohol in here so that you can kind of see how these joints fit and these things are actually just put together really fast it kind of goes to show you the accuracy of using a jig to cut something like this it doesn't require any special skill from the woodworker to do this figured pacific coast maple with mahogany spines really turned out something special so it was actually just scrap i was putting together for the video but i think i'm gonna have to turn this one into a box and in case i didn't mention it earlier i have a link to get plans for this in the description well that's it everybody i hope you enjoyed it and thanks for watching [Music] so [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Kings Fine Woodworking

Views: 640,774

Keywords: Woodworking, woodshop, woodworker, how to, DIY, make, maker, build, table saw, router table, sled, titebond glue, miter spline jig, spline jig, miter jig, mitered spline jig, dovetail jig, dovetail key, dovetail keys, dovetail key jig, jewelry box, keepsake box, decorative box, online class, woodworking jig, table saw jig, router jig, joinery, dovetail joinery, spline joinery, dovetail slots, sliding dovetails, dovetail joints, dovetail joint

Id: FRemSi82cWs

Length: 29min 19sec (1759 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 01 2018