I'm going to show you how to make a housing dado, this is a joint that passes into a side piece and we usually we use it to make bookshelves, first of all somewhere in the middle of my piece of wood I'm making one line, I'm taking the corresponding piece in making my second line so I made a second line right up against my square, pull my line across and that's given me a fairly close approximation of the width of the recess that I want to cut into this piece of wood, I'm going to transfer the lines to the side or to the edges of this piece of wood to, just like this this just guides my lines that I'm going to make with a marking gauge, the marking gauge just has a single pin in it and you can set this to any depth but i'm going to set mine to six millimeters which is about quarter of an inch, set the gauge and then run the pin right in between the pencil lines like this, flip it end for end like this and pull your line on the opposite face I'm going to strengthen these lines visually for you to see with the pencil I don't need this for what I'm doing we're going to chop out this centerpiece the first point I want to do is our first cut I want to make is going to be on one of these pencil lines so I'm going right up with the knife, with the blade of my square right up to the pencil line and actually I'm going just a hair over that pencil line so I can just see the pencil line almost underneath the blade here and I make one small light pass with very little press this one now is heavy I'm going very heavy on this last one it's super heavy I'm also going to go on to this edge here just so I don't get tear out on this outside face and the same on this edge here but the one thing I want you to notice is that I am not doing anything to this second pencil line at this stage I'm leaving that alone, the reason I'm leaving us alone is when I'm cutting this one I can move the knife wall over slightly it may just be a hair but it may be enough to make a variance that will show in the finished joint I go into my vise well secured a one inch wide chisel and then into the knife wall here just angling my chisel upwards about four millimeters from the line about one eighth of an inch and tap again here same distance tap I'm just overlapping the start point on my chisel and then I flick these out of the way just to make the recess definitive, now because this is wide I don't chop in here I'm not going to chop, I'm going to take this over somewhere near the leg of the bench to give me a very solid underpinning here so chop here, no more than that at this point because it will move the knife wall with compression on the face of the chisel so the single sided bevel causes that so I'm careful, see this bevel here has nowhere to go really so when I drive it down is pushing the chisel this way naturally so I don't go very heavily that's all, this time I'm about quarter of an inch away from my knife wall one chop like that and flick these and that will go down to the depth of my vertical chisel chop that I made, this time I've got a deeper wall I can go heavier with my chisel and you see here this is where my last chop was here so when I start my next one I overlap here by about six millimeters quarter of an inch like that and the same on this one that just helps me a line up the key the wall so i get this perfect wall all the way across I'm a bit further away now, see this it doesn't hit the knife wall it just goes down and when I flick this out it flicks actually above the angle of the chisel, flick, let me show you inside here can you see inside this here I have a very crisp clean line from the chop with the chisel it's not what you make it's how you make it so what here now keep your chisel as perpendicular as you can overlap you cuts again look for your depth I'm not there yet close though and now I move away again towards the pencil line but staying away from it so now just flick those out of the way take a look at your depth and this is where you have to consider how much pressure to strike your chisel with for this chop cut, quite hard but I really can't go any more than that it's not going to go any deeper because of the bevel can you see here I'm about two millimeter two and a half millimeters from the depth line to here, but my actual cut has gone down to depth it's actually penetrated the fibers and it's cut through them and I have a very nice and it's the same on this side here, I'm close so I can actually go in now and just remove a little bit of the waste going close to but not into the line certainly careful here not to go below my gauge line so when I register this chisel on this, so this is perfectly smooth here, when I register my chisel I register the full flatness of the chisel on the surface and then just chisel down into it and that has got me can you see the angle cut here see where I stopped and in here it's nice and smooth inside here nice and level and the same on this side one thing I'm going to do now is do the last row of chopped cuts here like this now I'm into that depth line I don't want to go any further than that, this is the next bit is getting this piece here into here has to be very pristine, I'm going to use the side because I get a straighter line and then I'm going to go is if I'm reaching underneath the corner right inside there this is so important to get this right it's as if you're reaching underneath I'm going to bring my square here just to trace a fine line without moving my knife now I'm going to turn around I'm going to slot my knife into that wall check it here to make sure I'm still on it which i am and I'm going to pull the knife this side of the blade because I want the bruising from the knife which is created by the bevel on the waste wood which is this bit here so I want to bruise on that side not on the good side which is this side so I get very crisp wall that way and in here go with my chisel like this just get your wall down just a little bit and flick this out of the way you see all this is just the depth of the vertical knife cut, keep your bench clean and here I'm going to chop vertically right up against my knife wall chop overlapping your cut again remember and into here in the vise and I'm going to chop down here see this registered against this edge here so it's dead flat in here like this not into the knife wall you don't want to hit the knife wall because you could be below and you'd weaken the fibers on the other side of the vertical cut can you see here this is good can you see these are my pieces and tight into this corner here you can see where it's going down to the knife cut but you can see actually my chisel cut was down here so I'm using the chisel to separate the fibers and create my cut, we will flick those out of the way chop cuts again now at this point I would suggest checking that you're not compressing this knife wall too much by offering your piece of wood into the recess here like this so if this is just a hair too tight don't worry about it at this stage because we haven't chopped all the way down, can you see there I'm just under sized on the recess that's probably good so this was at what I marked off here, can you see it's just going in to the cut here so it's good tight fit so now when I'm chopping when I go with a vertical chop like this here that is moving that knife wall ever so slightly maybe only as much as a thousandth of an inch but it will move the knife wall slightly so it's compressing the fibers so here I go in here pull those fibers out of the way now I've got a deep enough recess to actually try my piece in the recess here so, are we in the cut? we are, look what we've got a good tight solid fit and we don't want it super tight we don't want to have to pound this in but we do want a tight cut, we want crisp clean lines right inside the corners this is not actually fully fitted yet but it will go in I think shortly so here you can see from this side this time the bevel is hitting so this is compressing the wall again and I like that, I like the idea of compressing this knife wall into the main body of wood, now I come down again I'm watching my depth this time I don't want to go too deep so I leave a ridge all the way down the center of this recess so these all flick out of the way and I am close to depth equally on both sides, can you see there, now then I've got to take this midsection out and I want to make sure my vertical cuts look deep enough they do so now I'm going to go with a three quarter inch chisel it fits just in between and I'm taking just the very ridge of this off so here just using the heel of my hand for a minute and then into the cut double-handed, see this double handed technique, just slice over the ridge just taking it down, knock through the other side because this will could split off the surface fibers here I'm about two millimeters from my depth I might use a hammer, two-handed, to about almost three-quarters of the way and then last one I go right in the gauge line here, but I shoot skywards so I'm not going down into the cut this is where it gets a little bit harder because of the width of the cut, flip around ridge again first then right in my gauge line here, take off the ridge line and then as long as I'm even reasonably but it's hard to gauge the exact depth and that's when we use the hand router like this one here I'm going to set this so it's just skimming off the surface first not too much not too deeper cut like that so I take that off turn it about quarter of a turn do the same again turn it a little bit deeper like this now I'm treating this not like some kind of power router, treating this edge of the cutting edge more like a chisel so if I feel too much resistance I might take less of a cut so I go down, I'm still shy of the gauge line that I set but the bottom of the recess is getting more and more level so this can you see in here if I put this on here you can see for that first, can you see right inside there, see that first part is not cutting and if I look on this side can you see how my cutting edge is actually about two millimeters a sixteenth of an inch or so from full depth so I keep working that down until I'm level when I say I'm working this like a chisel instead of taking a full width cut sometimes I might just change the angle of presentation I can go all the way through because I'm not to full depth but after this last pass here I can't go all the way through anymore because I'll be down to depth probably now I'm going close to that and I'm going to take a knife wall right in the cut in the corner like this because I can see my vertical chiseled chops are not quite deep enough that just deepens it in there about a millimeter once I've gone here I'm going to turn this around and pull it from the unsupported edge to give me a clean edge on the outside so I am down to depth I'm going to turn this a fraction of a turn here just like this and I'm skimming off a thousandth off the surface there, now that is my housing dado whether this fits or not I don't know yet but here's the thing if this doesn't fit I could consider a couple of things do I want to take it off the wall like this, do I want to hammer it in, it's still a little bit tight so what we're going to do is set the plane so shallow so very shallow it's just going to take a thousandth off and I'm going across the surface fibers keeping my plane low you can see that's all I've taken off and I'm easing in to that edge so I took a thou' off there and this is into the recess this time so will this go I think it might that's how you cut a housing dado just tighten this corner here that's how you cut a housing dado and you get very crisp clean lines inside here and inside here and that's it Oh
