How to setup a Harbor Freight Dovetail Jig

so I bought this Harbor Freight dovetail jig and reading the reviews on it numerous people had problems setting this thing up and getting a good dovetail. Now I spent maybe two hours test cutting things on here and getting it dialed in and I'll show you exactly how to dial in your dovetail jig so I'm going to loosen up all these guides and everything like that and I'll show you exactly step-for-step what I did to get this dialed in So I'm going to un-dial it and so it's like it's right out of the box just loosen up everything. Out of the box this was reversed so i unscrewed these flip it around so that you push down like this to tighten. But before out of the box it had it pushing it this way to tighten one thing I recommend on this is using some teflon spray putting some on your finger putting some on these plastic rollers here these will move a lot easier silicone or Teflon is very works great and you'll notice a huge difference in the smoothness of these because before when I was cranking these down it was binding kind of we're going to start with the horizontal block then the vertical block with these make sure your eccentric rod is all the way up tighten it down to you start feeling pressure and then back it off half a turn tighten it down until you feel tension Back it off about half a turn. So mount the vertical piece in there We want to line this comb up about 5/32" from the edge of this. You can line it up 5/32" from the edge of your board and tighten down. Repeat the same thing on this side Tighten it down as tight as you can get it now you have your comb set at 5/32" from the edge so the next thing you want to do is set the depth of your bracket frame. so for this 3/4" piece of pine I found that measuring an 1-1/8" from the back of this comb is the correct depth next thing you want to do is just your stop pin right here and right here right here and right here the way i do this is first you put in the vertical piece of wood and clamp it in place so that your horizontal piece wood can get lined up correctly so what you want to do is have the edge of the wood half way underneath that the finger where it's going to start in so these fingers are half inch so you want to move your piece of wood over a quarter inch what you have it lined up clamp it down make sure it's up against your vertical piece of wood we measure measure twice cut once so after you have your horizontal piece of wood lined up halfway under a finger move the stop pin all the way up against the piece of wood that you just clamp down and have it sitting where you need it and tighten down the stop pin bolt with a 12mm millimeter wrench now that sets this side of your horizontal. So put the 1/2" shim right here put in your top horizontal piece clamp it down and your vertical piece can get lined up you put in a piece of wood and push down on the comb so that it doesn't move and you can get everything squared away Once you got this side lined up and clamp it down and move the stop pin all the way over and from my experience even this is not going to line up correctly so move this stop pin in about a 1/32" pull it out this way about 1/32" of an inch that way your edges because there's depending on your router and your your template guide you're going to have some slop in that so to line everything up found that you need to pull the stop pin for the vertical piece of wood stock out about the 1/32" of an inch and then tighten down the bolt and you can rinse and repeat on the other side again line it up a quarter of an inch underneath the finger once you have it lined up a quarter inch in between this tooth stop pin over and tighten it down and take your half and shim put it in between block and the horizontal piece and clamp it down you can align your vertical piece. Line it up on the right side this time and clamp it down sure that the outside edge is square just like you did on the left side you push the stop pin up against the piece of wood and pull it out about 1/32" of an inch so when you put in your horizontal piece you want to put your vertical piece in just so it can butt up against the edge of the vertical piece then clamped down your horizontal pieces but you have them aligned with the front and then for your vertical piece you want them to hold down on the comb fence and lifted all the way up and ensure that it is up against the stop pin and also all the way up against the comb do that for you can either do one at a time you do both at the same time but holding them can be kind of pain and that is pretty much the complete setup of the dovetail jig from harbor freight so I've got this plunge router from harbor freight and to do dovetails you need to have a template guide harbor freight does not provide you with the face plate to fit in here which would be easy to make if i had a 3D printer for these template guides so it would sit in there and you would screw this on there So I went out and bought another router. I bought the fixed base 2 horsepower router from harbor freight there's on had a 20% coupon. You have to put in the 1/4" collet in this and on this has these little ridges right here and these are completely around so i had to sand little recesses on these template guides for to fit in here harbor freight sells these template guides and it doesn't fit their own router so so i had to modify this template guide for the work you think they would sell parts that are completely compatible without having to modify anything or a five cent plastic piece of face plate from molded plastic for the plunge router that i already owned now I've got the template guide seated in there because this shaft on this is kind of short and this is also a harbor freight dovetail bit a 1/2" inch 14 degree dovetail this shank right here is kind of short so you have to be very very careful to ensure that you line this thing up correctly the way I do it with this router took me a few tries to get it right turn this all the way down until this collet nut hits this brass fitting right here Zero out this gauge right here to this mark here here's the zero mark and I turn it up two notches to get the collet nut off of the brass fitting so i take my little ruler with the square on it and set it at about 19/32" the instruction says to use 23/32" but I tried that already and it creates too tight of a joint and do it and it's not usable so the way i do this is set up your ruler or your gauge to 19/32" tighten it down a little bit until its snug pull it out a little ways and then tighten this down verify the depth spin it around make sure nothing's grinding on it so you have it in the ballpark where you need it on the outside edges I'm going to label these one and one then two and two so that you know which side is which so you don't get them mixed up you can remove the pieces and hopefully they will line up correctly ok so you see here this isn't deep enough we gotta move this bracket frame back maybe a 1/16" adjusted the frame bracket and I'll recut this on some clean edges There, perfect Re-measuring this to get a perfect depth cut here got to measure an 1-3/16" from the back of this comb on each side you get a good clean cut that took me about two hours initially to set it up and do tests cuts like this this is plenty tight I mean I can get it out and put it back together just fine you glue this clamp this let us sit overnight and it will be completely strong very tight and I've read on the harbor freight website where people couldn't get this thing to work can I don't know how they couldn't because the second time i set this up I had all the measurements and knew exactly what i needed to do so now you guys have the measurements the only drawback I see of this is the manual is wrong in some places this has to be a 7/16" template guide and not a 1/2". One place in the manual it will say 7/16" in another place in the manual is a 1/2" you got to use a 7/16" collar on this because a 1/2" won't fit in here and that's another gripe that people have on the harbor freight product review forums is they can't get a 1/2" collar in these 1/2" finger combs because the manual is incorrect in some of the areas like it says 23/32" from the face of the router when it's only 18/32" or 19/32" to get a very tight fit 23/32" will make it way too tight and you'll never get your joint together 19/32" or even 18/32" will fit perfectly so now you know how to set your Harbor Freight router up with a bit I would recommend getting a longer shank then the one that comes with this I don't know if they make those my check at Lowe's or Home Depot and see if they have a longer shank but this is the router bit set that i use and I'm just using the 1/2" dovetail so the shank length on this 1/2" dovetail bit is about 1.15" if you can find one with a longer shank it will make a seating this bit in the collet a lot easier because this it only has like the tip of this thing sitting in there and I've actually had this come out and grind into this so that's something you have to really watch is making sure your bit is completely in the collet.

Channel: MrDabrudda

Views: 497,174

Rating: 4.3838196 out of 5

Keywords: Harbor Freight, dovetail, router, 2 hp, 1/2, router bit, 14 degree, wood, wood working, dovetail jig, jig, drawer, glue, clamp, harbor freight dovetail jig, dovetail joint, how to, how to use a dovetail jig, router table, half blind

Id: DA43hjS_hUM

Length: 15min 37sec (937 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 04 2016