How to Cut Grooves with ONLY a Saw and Chisel

hello and welcome to the shed in today's video I'm going to be showing you how to do a Groove and a piece of wood using just a chisel a marking gauge and a saw I hope you enjoy we're going to be once again using this piece of wood that we've been doing all these joints in you can see the rebate on the bottom and on the side here and the dado that we've done so we're going to continue using this piece now for today's video we're going to mimic that this is going to be something like a drawer front that has a rebate on both sides so we might be nailing through or it's a side piece something like that so we're going to put a Groove in on the edge just here so when it comes to the groove the groove always goes along the grain if it's going across the grain it is called a dado or if it's on the end of the Border rebate same with the groove going along the grain if it's on the end of the board it's a rebate once again so the two main applications that grooves are used for for the majority of especially hand tool woodworking is for draw bottoms and the back of a carcass or a case or a cabinet is another way if you're not using a rebate a Groove is used and you'll get a complete housed back or Draw bottom in this case and there are a lot more applications that you can use a Groove for such as my grand cabinet down here if you've seen the videos where I've talked about that for making grooves for the doors to slide in and things like that once again I'm using the wheel marking gauge from km tools go ahead and use it whether it's a cutting gauge like this wheel cutting gauge a traditional cutting gauge or even a pin gauge that will work as well you want to make sure that you've got a nice sharp chisel before you begin doing this because you don't want to have to come back and sharpen it if you can avoid it but we always keep a stop handy to make sure that our chisel stays sharp and I'm going to be using the Japanese swore here again today just to show you that even these cheaper saws whether it's the Japanese saw like this or a gentle or such of this or any other back saw you can use either of these interchangeably for what we're doing today so because the groove we're doing here is going to mimic something like a drawer base like this we can see that this this actually comes up quite a distance this is up about 10 mil to the groove on this particular drawer which it's a little far for my liking on something as white as what that's got there so I'm going to come in about five millimeters we're going to run a gauge line there and if you've got two gauges go ahead and grab both of them because then you can set the top depth for whatever material you're going to be grooving in so I'm going to set this about five millimeters as I said before for this bottom one it doesn't matter too much I don't like to have any less than about five millimeters below something like a draw bottom it's going to take a lot of weight then up to about a centimeter or 10 mil actually works quite well to give a little more strength for it to take more weight but in the case of this one this is just mimicking say a lightweight draw like I have in like I had in my tool cabinet so we don't need to actually go up too far when we do this so five millimeters just so you know that's what I'm using but it's not what I always use but for the sake of this it is what we're going to be using so that is what we've got to mark our bottom gauge a bottom gauge line for This Groove so we're good to go with that one now we have a little bit of mass I have to kind of work out when we're doing the top Groove or the top line with our marking gauge so that is in this case we're going about seven millimeters plus five millimeters so with that done we come back to our board and we obviously want to run our bottom Groove in now it looks like this offset here is not a lot but this piece of wood actually has a radius on it so it actually makes it look thinner than it actually is and with both of these gauge lines we wanna put them in like we did with that rebate on the edge if you've seen that video as deep as we can put it so as deep as this cutting gauge will allow we want to go and then we go ahead and we do the same with this one down as deep as we can go with this foreign I have this thin piece of jarrow here and I'm going to use that to mimic what is going to go inside this groove so what we've got here is the thickness of this material now if I have a quick look at this the thickness of this material is seven millimeters so what we've gone ahead and done now once for this to be slid in here as if it was going to be a draw bottom or something like that so I've secured This Groove down so we can see it now if you've seen my other videos on how we do this we're going to want to come in with a chisel and make a little chisel wall up against that gauge line now I could use this but I'm just going to use a wider chisel use whatever chisel you have available but I'm just going to use a wider one to speed this up and we're going to come in at about that 45 degrees and just push back okay it's that nice deep gauge line which makes this process a lot easier and we just want to make sure that material comes all the way out as we can see here and yes you guessed it we want to do it to this side as well now to help remove this as you're coming along so you don't necessarily have to come back and get it you can actually just once you've hit that wall you can flick up and that just helps to remove that material as you go along and not leave it behind so I don't know if you can see that now but we've got these two little Groove lines here and as always we're going to use them to reference our saw to do our sewing to make it that much easier to be more accurate now if you followed along with my last do a rebate with the Chisel you could actually do this entire process with the Chisel but it's just going to be that much easier to actually do it with the saw and that's why we're going to use the saw here most of you are going to have some sort of cheap saw whether it is a Japanese Suzuki or a gent soil like this one so that's why I'm going to include the saw here because it's part of the basic kit and you can pick some of them up extremely cheap so you're going to have them most likely so now we can see I've got it round on my side so I can sort and we do want to hold that down now something you might be saying well you didn't say how deep you're going to the material now normally that is going to be about a third of the material to give you enough to hold that draw bottom in if you're going with a much larger cabinet like when I made my dovetail toolbox or tool chest I will leave that down below you can see where I did a groove on that using a plow plane and then recessed a very heavy bottom into that and in that case you can go a little bit further than a third up to a half if you want but I tend to try and say add a third of that material because I don't want to weaken it too much to hold the bottom especially if you're putting something thin like this in there which is not expected to hold too much weight than that third but even if you scale it up to something larger that third of the thickness of your material still is a good gauging and if you want to have a deeper Groove you might want to use thicker material for the box if that is something that you're looking into but then you've got to remember that the thicker the material the more material the heavier the box so you've got to fact all these things in when it comes to designing something like this so for this that's what we're doing and we're going down that seven millimeters because this is a 19 millimeter board and and I will list all of those basic joint videos down below for you so as you as usual I'm going to start on this side and we're going to bring the saw in up here and we're going to start nibbling now as usual I use my finger to push against the plate now that's not 100 necessary but if you're new to this that does just give you an extra reference up against that wall that you've got there and so we're slowing nibble all the way back you can see that I'm just moving my finger along here as I go to where I'm starting to nibble and this is more difficult on a longer board but you can still use the soil you're just going to ride back and forth until you've referenced it and then you can run up and down even with a shorter saw like this so you bring it down on my side first on the angle then I try to bring it down on the angle up this end and then take the middle of the waist out now if you're stuck using small Strokes like I am here this stage is not a hundred percent accurate if you're able to slide right through then you can get the depth by registering in it but because I'm hitting this little Ridge here I'm running into a few issues now you will notice that my saw plate is wandering all over the place a little bit and that's partially because I keep hitting up here but it's also this saw plate is very very thin and very very flexible even with the back foreign so I have run out of it a little bit here but I've brought it back into it now what you want to do is you can turn this around if you want to do the same referencing with your finger or you can just use that little cutout that we've done with the Chisel and just follow that along so now once you've referenced that down as deep as you can go with this or if you're getting stopped or if you've gone right to depth as you've marked because you've got the room to do so obviously the next step is to come back with the Chisel and we have to start removing that material so if you've got a chisel the size of the material that you're working with that is ideal if it's a little bit undersized from the groove that also works pretty well because you don't want your chisel to be getting jammed and if you have to do any work on the side walls of that Groove slightly wider chisel will be good for that you can come in and once again bevel down now the reason we use bevel down is that with the bevel the whole purpose of the bevel is as you pull into the material it pulls the Chisel away from the bevel into the material so it actually is allowing you to remove the material so if we do bevel down because it's moving to the bottom and away from the bevel it's going to pull it like this so we're not going to go too far we want to slowly work our material out like this because this is so narrow we don't really need to do stop Cuts here and we're kind of just remove it like this and we're essentially doing little tiny stock Cuts in this fashion but because we're with the grain we don't really need the stock Cuts in this particular situation and one of the reasons we don't really need stock Cuts here is because we've got both sides cut and we've got such a thin amount we're able to just remove it straight with our chisel so if you feel that you actually need these stop Cuts you can go ahead and do them but in this particular situation I don't feel that that it's actually necessary unless you think you need it to control your depth of cut in which case you can just go ahead and do it now that I'll come right up at this edge here I'm going to go bevel up and I'm going to pop that in material and run my chisel foreign as far as I can but obviously I'm not going to be able to go all the way now if this was right through you could then come in this way and cut it or turn it around now for the sake of this I'm not going to turn around I'm just going to come in from the side here and I'm going to show you how you would go about doing this you can either keep doing your chisel this way or you can come in and this is still beveled down because I don't have the room to get bevel up and I'm just going to take a little bit of that material out now bevel down again and this is how you're going to be able to remove the majority of your waist through a Groove that is really really long because obviously this chisel is only going to come so far even if you had a pairing chisel you might be able to go that distance but if you're doing a Groove this long of this entire board you'd never be able to do that so we can see just by removing this material we're almost down to depth inside this groove I'm down to depth here now and we just want to keep pull down and slowly remove these little curls into where the depth we want or the depths we think we want now to judge that at either end you can come in and use the referenced flat of your chisel right here and the whole point of using that reference flat is that you can then run off wherever your depth is and you know exactly how deep down came and so I can punch that material out and then I've got a reference back here for how much I need to remove up here with the bevel down just come in along this Edge make sure these Corners are nice and sharp and square and anywhere where you missed a little bit with the saw because the saws are not 100 accurate so now that we've done that you can once again come in it doesn't really matter whether you go bevel up or bevel down here that's your preference but if it's in the middle like this you're going to have to go bevel down to remove that material anyway and then you can just drag chisel back through here just as a little bit of a scraper to smooth that out and now we appear to have our groove done so let's grab the material that I was going to put into here and see how well it fit so we can see along here this is actually fairly clean we have that slight Gap that we wanted to allow there just so there is a little bit of movement like this but obviously what you've got to bear in mind that something like this is probably trapped in an entire Square so it's not going to rock like that once it's in there but it does mean that you can slide it on like this without it catching and if you do end up having to leave your board for a while and it might swell slightly if you've got moisture in your shop obviously you're going to try to acclimatize the timber that you're using but maybe you get some extra moisture or something in an uninsulated Workshop like mine and so that little extra leeway allows you that extra room for this to still slide even if there is some sort of movement within your Timber and if we look this way we can see that we've also got that same squareness and we've got a nice flat bottom right through there you have it folks as you can see it's once again a fairly quick simple and easy and basic process to doing joinery for a Groove I do believe it's rather important to be able to learn how to do this joinery and these different joinery techniques in the very basic of forms so then when you're stuck in a situation where you don't have room for your plow plane or maybe you can't afford a power plane and you're just getting started and you want to do a nice little draw for your first cabinet that you've done with some rebates and you want to put a drawer in there you can go ahead and use a Groove instead of having to use a rebate on the bottom bit because you want to be a little more fancy and use a Groove well now you can using just the Chisel and a saw if you have one so if you like this video please consider liking subscribing down below really does help the channel out more than you know if you'd like to support me a little bit further please consider checking me out on patreon or giving a super thanks to this video while you're down there liking and subscribing so if you like this video and you'd like to see some more videos such as this one please check out the video up here where I you a rebate along the long range just using a chisel and I'll leave the playlist up here which this video is going to be part of which is the beginner playlist and also the woodworking joint video playlist up here bye for now

Channel: Aussie Woodshed

Views: 6,021

Keywords: aussiewoodshed, Handtool woodworking, Hand-tool woodworking, Restorations, furniture builds, tutorials, wood, chisel, groove, saw, woodwork, how, howto, tip, circular, Do It Yourself (Hobby), Tutorial, plow plane, goove without a plow plane, basic hand tools joinery, only a saw and chisel, saw and chisel joinery, plough plane, back to basic joinery, back to basic woodworking, basic joinery with tools you already own, joinery that wont break the bank, no specialist tool required

Id: 72fiL9LTgEo

Length: 18min 48sec (1128 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 03 2023