A Simple Router Jig for Making Dados / Easy Dado Joints

hello everyone i'm colin connett today we're going to make a datawing jig and it might be the simplest jig you'll ever make but if you're new here today i invite you to subscribe click the notification bell and let's get making this simple date wing jig let's have a quick look at the supplies we're going to be using today so to start off with i have a 21 by oh about 14 inch wide piece of three-quarter inch plywood i have a thin strip of board that's absolutely straight along one side and i ran that through my jointer and it's 21 inches by a little over an inch and that doesn't really matter you'll see that in a minute i'm also going to need my carpenter square today and we've got some chunks and bits of material around here i'm going to show you that as well but before we get started on doing anything i want to show you the router bits the rotor bit i'm going to be using today this is a quarter inch shank is called a templating bit and it has the bearing between the shank and the bit now don't get that confused with a flush trim bit see how the bearing is at the tip of this one this has a totally different function this will not work for what we're doing today so this is the bit we're going to be using and i'm going to show you how we use that later on in a moment i'm going to be attaching this piece of wood to my plywood and you can see that i've got a mark on here this mark wants to be on the inside and that's because this is the side that went through the jointer and it's absolutely flat now i'm going to want to attach it to the plywood down here so i've marked roughly the center here and a couple of places where i want to drill some holes so i'm just going to go off camera to my drill press and just drill those holes quickly and when i come back we'll start doing the attachment now before i go any further a couple things i want to clarify so there's the the piece of wood with the holes drilled in it and i have one screw it's not doing anything it's just placed in there this wood is square but it doesn't matter if this is off or this is off because when we go over to the table saw this is the only part that's going to matter this is my leading edge here and i'm going to eventually be cutting this in half and it's important that you do the methodology the way i'm showing you rather than cut all of these pieces and try and put them together afterward and the reason for that is if what if you did all that doing them separately there's a chance some of these might be off a little bit and this way is a much easier quicker way of making sure that both of these are going to be exactly at 90 degrees each one of these because we've got it all the way across here and now i'm going to use my carpenter square so what i'm going to do first of all is fasten down one side and i don't want it fastened really tightly i just want it just snug and you may need to hand tighten yours a little bit because you want it to be able to move just a little bit you don't want it to be sloppy but you want it to be able to move a little bit more okay now when i put my square on here now i because this wood is still movable i can easily i can easily move that so that it's exactly perfect but before i put a screw in there what i want to do is clamp it so that i make absolutely sure that it's not going to move on me now i've changed this around so you get a little bit different perspective for this as well and this clamp is still it's a little bit loose in here you can see i can move this back and forth but when you see when i have this aligned here and you can see that this is nicely snugged up all the way along it's right tied up and now i can very carefully clamp that down and i can see that it hasn't moved and now only now can i start putting all of the screws in and i want to start on this end okay i've pre-set up the table saw and now we're just going to cut this piece of plywood with the the attached wood on i'm just going to cut it in half [Music] i should have done this before i did the cut but even now is fine so here's where i made the cut and you can see it's a nice crisp line through there what i want to do is i want to mark that center just like that and that's because i want to make sure that i only use this part for making my dado cuts i don't want to use these because i don't know what these are well there's our two pieces and you can tell because i've marked them front and back and i've got this piece of wood this is just a piece of scrap and i'm using this because there's a knot here and a crack here so this area i wouldn't use so we're going to do the demonstration on that part and the way it works is quite simply you put this is going to hook on the front on each side and i have a shelf here that we're going to use for the demonstration and this is how easy this jig works you put the shelf in there the width of the shelf that you want to cut the dado for and you move the two pieces together and you may have one side pre-marked so that you want to know where the shelves are but that's how you find the thickness and because i'm using such a narrow board here i'm using this spacer board at the back and this really doesn't matter to anything because what i'm going to do now is i'm just going to take my clamps and i'm going to fasten that now i've tightened down the clamps and you can see that the shelf that we have here the little fake shelf fits in there nice and snug so that should be a good fit i've already set up the router and you can see when i push this all the way down that it's going to bottom out on the turret here on the other side whereas there it is there so that's already set now the other thing that i want to show you is i'm going to do something a little more complex too i'm actually going to do a stop dado so i'm going to move the the router bit over to this area here and i actually want to go out about a half inch is as far out as i want to go and i'm going to mark that in a second and and then basically i'm going to route out this whole area in here and then we'll show you how you figure out the shelf the the depth of that cutaway that little rabbit cut on that shelf unit [Applause] right so now there's our dado cut and i did just try this a second ago but now the question is you can see at the end here where you know how do you get it all the way well what you do is you cut a little piece out of here and i'm going to show you how you can get a perfect cut out of there very quickly and simply now in my case i could have gone a little bit further and i did mean to go a little bit deeper in because now i've got a little bit of work because there's where i need to cut the notch from so i really need to go on this fake little shelf here i need to go that deep i'm going to use a pole saw and basically what i want to do is lay the pull saw along the flat of the wood now here's the trick to cutting these little notches basically the my pole saw is about the thickness of this veneer that i have and i have all sorts of different veneers of different thicknesses i also so what i'm going to do eventually i'm going to be pulling my pull saw along here to get the cut but i don't want to be pulling it on this piece of wood here because i don't want to scratch my nice piece of furniture that i've worked so hard so what i want to do i'm going to lift this up because it's the thickness of that saw blade so i'm going to thicken lift it up by two thicknesses because i also want to put a piece of wood on here and now if i hold that nice and steady and i actually may take this off a second just clamp this because i don't want this wiggling around and then i'm just going to use my pull saw and i'm going to pull all the way to here and then we'll just nip that little bit off there and that should fit in there absolutely perfectly there i just tape that down and that's working perfectly now okay there's the part that i just cut off and you can see where there's a little mark in there i'm just going to put my chisel in there now that's gone we'll take the blanks out of there and now when we put that in we get that the right way that should fit all the way up to the front and yeah there we go see that a nice tight fit in there all the way around and that's how you put shelves in well that concludes my video for today and you know jakes don't have to be complex they can be as simple as this one a couple of pieces of scrap wood and now you've got a variable you can put any size shelving unit in there any width that you want and make a shelving unit or any kind of a dado cut and you can make these all sorts of different sizes it doesn't matter as long as you make sure that you've got an absolute 90 degree there on each side you can make perfect shells i'm colin kanat for woodwork web thanks for watching you

Channel: WoodWorkWeb

Views: 726,367

Keywords: router, dado, dados, router jig, making dado, router jigs, wood router, jig, woodworking jigs, router dado, joinery, making router dados, dado jig, dado joint, router dado jig, router jig diy, rabbet, router jig making, rabbet jig, router jig dado, woodworkweb, colin knecht, wood working jigs

Id: GzWQdlmGtRQ

Length: 11min 38sec (698 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 13 2017