How to Make a Dado Joint With Hand Tools

hello and welcome back to the shed and today's episode is the third video in the wooden joint series in today's video we're going to be dealing with the dado hope you enjoy [Music] the dado is a joint where two boards are joined at 90 degrees on the flat axis of the board so when the boards are flat like this and it's most commonly seen in cabinetry for the use of fixed shelves the tools we'll be using today is marking gauge a square two different size chisels a wheel marking gauge a tenon saw and a mallet we'll also be making use of the hold fast again to hold our boards down so the marking out and layout for a dado is one of the most simple things you could do it is very easy and it's not a very time consuming process it is actually very quick and easy to do the joint is done across the board so we will be severing the fibers using a knife before we get in there and saw it out and then chisel it okay so i've gone ahead and drawn a line here so we've measured up and this is where we want our shelf to start here so a shelf is going to come in and it's going to sit in here like this when we do a dado measurement you could use a marking gauge and run a line there or use a ruler but i find it's better to use the actual piece of wood we're going to be using so since we've got a knife line there we can push our piece of wood up against that we can judge it here and here and we can make a little nick on this opposing side here now that we've got that nick we can come along like this push up to it and make our mark now this piece is 19 mil thick so theoretically our line should be 19 mil and 100 is 19 mil so the next thing we need to do now that we have our two lines on here is we need to mark our line on here for how deep we're going to cut this little dado here so i've got this marking gauge here set to six millimeters i'm using the rule of thirds as you've seen me mention when i did the tenon video if you've seen that uh this is 19 mil so six millimeters is roughly a third of it so we're going to put that mark on both sides then we're going to get the square marked down from these lines so we have a line marking the dado all the way around so we have our baseline here these lines cut in with the the knife we have our original lines drawn in for the thickness of our board and we have this co the corresponding marking on the off so now we have to go ahead and cut this out there's only a couple of little things we need to know when we're cutting this out is we don't want to go past these lines that we've drawn here so we definitely want to make sure we're cutting on the inside and we can clean those shoulders up later afterwards with a chisel if we slightly undercut them it's better to take too little off than too much and in this case you would have a very loose dado joint if you did that so we're going to saw this out so the first step to make sure we get that dead accurate line is we're just going to cut back with the chisel against that knife line on both sides and we'll just clear that waste out and again there's a little bit of waste left in there so just grab your knife and remove it because you don't want any of that sitting in there disrupting your saw coming through and we'll do the same on this side so now we have these two ridges in place i'm just gonna just along the edge here we're gonna grab our tenon saw and like everything else we're going to start at the far side and we're going to nibble our way back across that line using our finger to push it against that little ridge that we've done with the knife so now we've got this engaged here we're going to go ahead work it down to our line so now we've got that cut we need to remove this waste now that is quite a big piece of waste to just smash out with a chisel or top out with a chisel or a router plane or anything like that so what i'm going to do is come in right in the middle and i'm going to cut another curve now what that's done is meant that we've got a much smaller area so when we're taking it out with the chisel it's going to be much easier to remove so what we're going to do now is bring our chisel in and i'm going to go bevel down and we're going to sit right at the top and i'm going to try to not use the mallet and i'm just going to try and push out what will come out we can also go bevel up for this process as well if it's causing a problem and we just work our way through [Music] a joint like this is a mechanical joint and if you've done it nice and tight it doesn't really need glue to hold it you could add a little bit of glue to make sure it doesn't fall out and that that's all that would be required but normally you'd have it on both sides of of a board to hold the shell so therefore there's not really any chance of it dropping out unless there was a lot of weight in the middle and you had no support on it so there you have it folks that's how you mark up cut out and do a dado joint for something such as a shelf thank you for watching i hope you enjoyed the video if you like what you saw in this video and would like to support me and allow me to continue making these great videos for you please consider liking and subscribing and checking out my facebook and instagram pages i also encourage you if you have any questions related to the content in any of my videos please leave it in the comments below and i'll try to get back to you thank you

Channel: Aussie Woodshed

Views: 3,907

Keywords: aussiewoodshed, Handtool woodworking, Hand-tool woodworking, furniture builds, tutorials, woodworking joints, joinery, dado, dado joint, how to, housing dado, fixed shelving support, cabinet making, housing dado joint

Id: Eu5PqQ1Hy_E

Length: 8min 46sec (526 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 08 2021