Make a Dado Joint using a Router Plane w/ Bill Anderson

[Music] [Music] we're going to start looking at how to set up and use a router previously in this video we cut two dedos with wooden and metal dado planes the disadvantage of cutting dedos with a dental plane is that you're restricted to the size of plane for the stock that you're going to use so you have to fit your stock to your the data that you cut the router plane you fit your data to the stock the other way around we're going to use a piece of stock here to measure how wide we want our data to be and then we're gonna cut that data using a router plane saw chisel so on and so forth to get that to be precisely match this right here and we'll show a couple different ways to use router planes to do this let me just say that one way to use a router plane is to set the router to the depth for example of a rabbet in the back of your cabinet that you want set the router to that depth and use that as a marking gauge so when I get ready to lay out my dado I know I want it to be this deep I can use this router to scribe the dado across the front and scribe the data across the back of course it'll be continuous this surface here and then I can saw and chop out my data and when I clear it out it'll will cut it down to this level right here another way to do that is to bring the cutter down incrementally starting at one point and then working way through you can do that on both both routers you know I'm just showing you two routers set up in different ways this one here has got a this shoe out and remember talking about that the shoe is used to fill in a open throated open throated router here like this so that it has a enclosed throat this one has an enclosed roach you can see the difference between it to open throat here closed throat here so Stanley made this little appurtenance here to get people to option having a closed throat or an open throat router not exactly sure why an open throat router is so important because I find the closes more versatile but anyway this little device here can be used as a depth stop I'm going to drop it in and set it to the depth of my rabbit snug that down and then set this shoe to match the depth of that post now so that shoe acts like a stop when I release the post here the router will cut down and tell this when this bottoms out I know I'm down at the bottom of my cut let's go ahead and lay out this dat'll and you'll see a little bit better all the things I'm talking about here the very first thing I'm going to do is lay out a square line across the stock where I want my data to be so knife a square go ahead and draw this in scribe it in with a knife get a good mark bring the stock right up to that line so I can just just not see that line come over here make a small prick mark bring the square up to that prick mark and scribe a second line everything between here is waste I'm going to come through and I'm going to make this a number one cut by chopping down on the shoulders that I've scribed dropping the chisel into that scribe line right there working my way down making sure I've got a good good shoulder right there not going down very deep on this first cut just deep enough to make my mark I'm going to come back and take our little V this gives a place for my solder to rest the solid shoulder for it to rest on and keeps the curve for the saw below the work now some people after they ascribed this line will come back through with a corner of a chisel and there will slice out this V with a corner a chisel or they might deal with a knife as well I'm not that versatile with a knife so I've never really done it that way my friend Lauren Hill is an expert with scribing with a knife and he does it that way and gets excellent results so I know that's a perfectly valid method to use it's just not the method I use so I'm gonna show you this method here and this one will work as well the bottom line is what we're doing here is making a place for our salt so this is a crosscut operation I want my saw to rest in this groove and I want to carefully establish a kerf here never do I raise my handle I'm liable to score the backside of the cut by lower my handle I'm liable to score the front side I've got to establish this curve flat and then I'm going to saw down the scribe line which I have not actually yet subscribed let me go ahead and do that using my router right there so we'll continue to saw this you want to saw as flat as possible then the other side I'm using my hands to push my saw against the shoulder here almost invariably I find don't really saw straight across a slot like this to exaggerate so I get to the line here first I'm a little bit high in the middle we'll worry about that later on when we start working with the router so as I said one way is to chop all this waste out with a chisel and that will happen pretty quick out here you want to be careful about chopping out and going below the line we don't want that to happen so we'll come and put the chisel right on that right on the scribe line there just to make sure that that doesn't happen this is a very quick way to get most of this work out of the way and then we'll come through you remember this router was set to be the final depth so just now over here I'm gonna come back the other way I don't want to break out you need to bring this up just a little bit because I have a depth stop here my router won't go any deeper then cut I've set so you notice the bottom is a little bit rough that's because we're using a cutter that's square crossed if we were to use a cutter one of the spear point cutters we'd give more of a slicing cut all the way across the route do in fact have a dado that's exactly the same depth as our work and fits in there very tightly matched exactly to our stock we're sure one other example of the use of a router and that's to straighten up cheeks on a tenon after they've been sawn out and let me just take a minute to get set up for that demonstration one other tasks that a router is eminently suited for is to flatten out or even the cheeks of Tenon's that have been sawn out it's often the case that when a tenon is sawn out to maybe it's a slight twist this way or this way in the shape of the tenon we need may need to average that out and doing that with a router is a very good solution trying to use a chisel to do this or even a shoulder plane is a little bit problematic because we tend to want to round over the edges and and make the cheeks not quite flat one of the first things in order to do something like this would be to set the router exactly to the layout line for the tenon now it's often the case that the Tenon's aren't exactly in the center of the stock and if I were to flip this over and set this line here you can see my router does not touch the layout line on the other side so when you're doing something like this you'll go through and you'll do all the tenants from one side of the thing you're doing a frame and you got four tenants all the way around you'll do all the one side of the Tenon's with the router set exactly on the line there clean up these then you flip them all over and reset the router to the other side and then do all those so let me just go ahead and do that I've set the router to this which face did I set it to I set it to this one right here so we'll do this face first go ahead and put it in a in a holdfast I might normally put another block of whittier to protect this material but this being just a demo I'm just not going to worry about that part Snug it down I have another piece of wood it's an off cut it's the same thickness as a stock I'm cutting my Tenon's out of and I'm going to use that to help balance the router all the way across like this so as you can see as I do this part of my tenon is a little bit high on this outside part and I've just got that in fact I'm not just not touching it I'm gonna advance my my cutter just a just a tad give myself just a little bit make sure I get a a nice even cut across the full width and I'm happy with that now so I would do that on all four Tenon's on that side [Music] flip my work over reset the marking gauge there I should say the router to that new mark it's still a little bit shy so we'll well loosen this and I'll advance adjust a little bit to make sure it drops right on that line snug it up and then work on this side if I skew the cutter right into the shoulder I can get that shoulder nice and sharp on that corner right there and just clean that out with the chisel afterwards but in this way I can guarantee that the tenon is flat this way and flat this way no twist no slope and the tenon and also a very useful way to fit your mortise and tenon joints together this is Joshua Farnsworth if you're interested in learning traditional woodworking with hand tools visit my website at wood and shop comm where you can find free video tutorials workshop tours of amazing traditional woodworkers and tool buying guides you can ask questions and share your projects with thousands of woodworkers on my free traditional woodworking forum make sure you subscribe to my regular blog posts and also check out my 10 steps for getting started in traditional woodworking enjoy you

Channel: Wood and Shop

Views: 40,760

Rating: 4.8987951 out of 5

Keywords: woodwork, woodworking, traditional woodworking, roy underhill, woodwright's shop, chris schwarz, lie-nielsen, hand planes, hand saws, chisels

Id: eljCzinSTkQ

Length: 16min 25sec (985 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 24 2019