Make a Donkey's Ear for your Shooting Board

when you want to create a miter you're typically going to cut your parts on a chop saw or a miter saw and what will typically happen is you'll set the blade to 45 degrees you'll make your cuts and you'll get a pretty good cut depending on the sharpness of your blade how stiff your saw is things like that this this was just cut on my chop saw which is set up pretty well with a decent blade on it but if we look at it closely when i put this together there's i can rock that a little bit and and close up the joint at the tip i'm not sure that really showing up but it's it's not quite as good as it could be so i would want to clean that up a little bit better and i'm going to do that on a shooting board now the other miter joint is like that and that would be if we're you know making a box or a cabinet like that and similarly i can cut that on the chop saw but if i can clean it up with a shooting board i'm going to get a much nicer joint i've got my shooting board here with a miter fixture on it this is just a simple piece of plywood with a hardwood strip on it and the hardwood strip is so i can plane it to fine-tune the angle it's mounted on here just with a knob that threads into an insert in the shooting board so to use it i'm just going to put this up against here that looks great and that looks great so that's uh let's say a picture frame miter if i want to do a box miter with the boards flat i need a different jig for that that different jig is a donkey's ear now this i think technically is not a donkey's ear but it works like a donkey's ear and i'll show a picture of what would be a more traditional donkey's ear this is a design that's fairly common if you search on the web for donkeys here you'll see something similar to this and it mounts on my shooting board similarly there's a hole here and i've got a knob so i'm going to go ahead and attach this and use this to clean up those other miters i've got this on here now so let's go ahead and clean up these guys okay once again nice clean cut so let's see how those look so here's the picture frame miter that looks great nice and clean and here's the box miter and get that lined up there we go nice and clean no gaps that looks fantastic making this jig is pretty straightforward like i said it's a piece of plywood with a piece of hardwood glued on here so i can true it up and and really dial in the 45 degrees this other one is a little trickier so i'm going to walk through the process of making this and i have the procedure for that so i'll be following that as i go i've got all my parts cut out per the cut list i'm using baltic birch for the man-made sheet materials so i've got the bottom the two sides which i'm going to cut at 45 degrees and the ramp and that's going to get a 45 degree cut at the bottom and then for the the fence and the spacer here i've got some poplar i want to use something relatively soft because you know i'm going to be cutting into it a little bit at times and mine parts are actually a little thinner than three-quarter i just had a piece of kicking around but as long as these are the same thickness right they need to be the same because of the support there i'm going to be just fine so i'm going to go cut cut my angled pieces here the first cut i'm going to make is the 45 degrees at the bottom of the ramp now i i'm not going to use my fence for this because that's that's too unstable i don't have enough of a wheelbase there so i rarely use my miter gauge but this is one of the times when it's going to come in handy so i'll just make the cut like that with supported on my miter guide and that should keep things nice and stable [Music] next up i'm going to make these 45 degree cuts so i've got a fixture here on my sled i just clamp it to my sled and i'm going to put this here i've got this set up so the kerf is in line with that so i'm just going to align one corner there and clamp that down and i should be able to make two identical cuts [Music] okay and that's that's great nice and smooth now if i didn't have this jig i would you know i these these parts were square so i could just draw a line corner corner make a cut maybe on the bandsaw and then sand them very carefully flat i you could actually hand plane these but it's going to be hard on your hand plane you'll definitely have to sharpen it afterwards because these glue lines definitely will will mess with your blade uh so whatever works for you but we definitely need two pieces virtually identical as close to 45 degrees as you can get now if there's not quite 45 we'll have a chance to tweak that later next i'm going to create the rabbets that the bottom fits in so they are a quarter of an inch deep and a 16th of an inch wider than the thickness of this material so what i'll do is i'll set i'm going to set the fence to the correct dimension here and the dimension is the thickness of the material plus a 16th so that's you know half the width of the blade i just happen to get that pretty darn close there so remember i want to measure to the left side of the of the blade so i'm going to be making a cut like that and i need to remember i i need a left and a right to these so i'm going to cut one like that and one like that now if i was thinking ahead i should have done this while these were square it would have been a little easier but this this is still going to work just fine so i need to set the blade so it's about a quarter of an inch so that looks okay that's good quarter inch cut and cut this gives me a left and right [Music] next i'll make the other cut so i want to come over uh i want to go in a quarter of an inch so i'll measure from the outside of my piece to the right side of the blade i don't want to cut it this way oh because i don't want my offcut trap between the the blade and the fence so i have to do it so my offcut is on the left side so that looks actually pretty close yeah that looks fine and then for the height i just need to raise the blade up so i'm in inside my curve and we'll see how that looks [Music] [Music] alrighty that looks great now i should point out i i did cut on the first cut i went a little deeper than a quarter and i can just see the score marks from the blade which is good because if if i'm a little shallow on both cuts then i end up with some crud or a little step in the corner so going a little deeper on one of the cuts ensures that i i have a nice square corner so that that looks great i also want to verify that i've i've got you know a little bit extra material here about a sixteenth so so that looks great the next step is to attach the sides to the bottom so i'm going to mark for my screw holes and i'm just eyeballing here i'll go ahead and drill clearance holes and countersinks here then we'll go ahead and attach those i've got this clamped in place and i'm just going to use the same size bit as my clearance hole just to dimple here so that i know where to drill my pilot hole [Music] pilot hole bit now that's out about the same length as my screw inch and a half so i'll take this off throw some glue in there and put it together hey hey okay next i'm going to attach the ramp now when when you put the ramp on you need to pay attention to two things one make sure you set it in the correct orientation we can have it flush on this side or on this side now since my my current one is for right-handed shooting i'm going to make this one for left-handed shooting so i'm going to make this edge flush the other thing to watch out for is you want the bevel down don't i've seen people make this like this and now your part sits sits above your your regular shooting board so so make sure it's beveled down and i'll go ahead and same as before drill some clearance holes and pilot holes and then attach this to the sides here one other thing to watch out for you know when you mark for these holes you know pay attention to where they're headed here if you put this one too close to the end you might come out here so i'm going to set this up so i can see what's happening and i don't want to hit this other screw here either so i'll put the first one about there top one about there and then i'll put the other one in the middle you also make sure you mark the center this way right depending on where you put this it's going to make a difference on where the screws go so i'm attaching this on the one side just kind of temporarily make sure [Music] it's in position so that feels good now i'll go ahead and do this side [Music] all right i didn't glue this on this isn't under the same forces as this bottom piece and i might want to take this off at some point to you know get inside there so so that one's not glued on so we'll install the fence and the spacer next before i install the fence i need to cut my angles down here so i've set my combination square here just a little over three quarters since i think that's probably the thickest material i'll ever be cutting on this so i'm gonna i'm gonna set this so this is hanging out here by that amount and i need my 45 degree to be you know basically there there and there so i'll go cut that on my chop saw i've got my holes drilled here and before before i drilled them i marked where they were so i wanted to drill so i'm going into the plywood here i don't want to be going into the end grain if i can avoid it and i also marked them so i'm not going to hit these screws here so those are ready to go so i'll go ahead and mount that at the same time i drilled a hole in the spacer so that'll that'll sit down there okay this is almost ready to go i did have to move my spacer a little bit because this fence is a little shorter than than a typical fence so i just moved that over a little bit so that mounts on there nicely now i've got a insert which i actually just installed i didn't have one on this shooting board and i found with with this jig and and with my other miter jig the best place to put this is five and a quarter from the reference here and three and a quarter from the fence so i'm going to now that this is all together i'm going to measure the same dimensions you know from here and there and drill a hole there so i can attach this to the shooting board i've got a piece of wood clamped inside here so that when i drill through here i don't get tear out so we'll see if i can i've got my knob ready to go now i just took a 5 16 female knob and epoxied in a bolt and before i try this out i need to chamfer this back edge so i'll go ahead and put this on here make sure it's you know tight up against my fence and we'll try it out here okay so that's all cleaned up so i'll get a test piece and we'll give it a shot i've got the same test pieces i had before when i did the initial demonstration i also particularly when i'm using the the donkeys here it's a little hard to hold the shooting board from moving around so i've got a piece in my vise here some you know or i could use a bench dog just to keep it from pushing that way so we'll give this a shot so i'm going to cut both pieces and they certainly look good just just looking down in there okay so that looks great now in order for this to be working correctly you know two things have to happen the the cut needs to be square and of course it needs to be at 45 degrees so to check it for square i've got two pieces i'm going to set them back to back and set them so that that sharp corner sitting on my bench and if both these edges are aligned which they are then my cut is square if if they were you know like that then i would have to tweak the jig a little bit and what i would do is either take a little bit of material off of this surface or this surface to to get things square so fortunately that lined up very nicely the other thing i need to check is am i at 45 degrees and you can just measure one of these but i've found you know that certainly looks pretty good it might be off a hair but what what i find is better is it's a little trickier to do it's easier with two people but hold this nice and tight and check for 90 degrees and you can do that or maybe hold that at 90. so yeah so that i can wiggle that a little bit and that that is when i just check 45 that's kind of what it looked like so it's a little further it's a little steeper than i want i really need to take a little material off the end in order to fix that yeah so if if i want to remove more off of the end i need to drop the back end of this so that's why i when we made that rabbet to put the bottom on that's why we left this 16th so now i've got some material i can remove here and here as opposed to taking it off this whole surface so i'm going to i think for something like this i'm actually going to use well i could use my hand plane it's a little tricky because i've got to get both of these i could sand them if i had a big you know a big block with sandpaper on it it's a little tricky to do that but i think the best way is going to be using a plane and like i said i'll dull my plane a little bit but it's only one time here i've got this in the vise so i can plane it i did take one swipe there so well i think what i'm going to do is go increasing or decreasing lengths of cut here three that's actually four five six one two three four five okay let's give that a shot and i'll i'll continue to do that until i've got this dialed in when when i'm done or maybe even now i should check to make sure this is not rocking yes i apparently took an even amount off both of those so i'll i'll uh go back and forth maybe and test this a few times till i get the 45 just right all right i've got this dialed in now i'm getting nice 45 degree cuts for a total of 90 degrees it took another set of passes with my block plane to to get it to the right angle but now it's dialed right in so uh this is good to go i i'm not sure i mentioned i did you know kind of round over edges a little bit just to make it a little easier to handle i always try to avoid doing any sanding anywhere where the blade is going to be hitting because that that grit can really chip your blade easily so i did not stand down in this area so i think we're all set i wanted to mention one other thing this is this is another little yes donkey's ear kind of thing that i've used this is this is obviously a right-handed uh version this is for smaller stuff uh i've used this just for you little parts if you're making little drawers or things like that or if you're making little compartments for drawers this works nicely i i've only used it once or twice i should probably you know make a a hole here so i can attach it to the shooting board but nice thing about this one is it's just you know four pieces of mdf glued together but it's small enough that i can tweak this on my disk sander whereas you know this is too big to deal with that that machine but uh this works nicely for for smaller items so i think that covers everything for the donkey's ear

Channel: Carl Stammerjohn

Views: 20,907

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Id: J2iKnYANXic

Length: 23min 42sec (1422 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 24 2021