Master the Perfect Dado with Basic Hand Tools

hello and welcome to the shed in today's video I'm going to be showing you how to cut a dado using basic hand tools hope you enjoy so if you saw last week's video where I was introducing the dado the rebate and the groove I told you that we'll be going through and I'm going to show you how to do each of them so what I'm going to be doing in this video is showing you how to do it just with the very basic of tools and then we'll Advance into some more specialty tools to actually help you do these joints a little bit easier a little bit faster and with a little more accuracy and repeatability so if you're using them within a project you can get them done faster and have the same results for each single dado that you do so the tools we're going to be required to use today Square marking knife pretty standard chisel um doesn't really matter the size depends how wide you're going with your chisel if you've got a chisel that's the exact width sometimes that's a little bit easier sometimes you might want a second chisel that's a little bit smaller just to help remove the waist it might make that little bit easier it's that's really up to you so I'm just using a chisel that's about 12 mil here so um you know it's really up to you what you choose when it comes to a chisel with saws some sort of fine-toothed back saw whether that's a Japanese style duzuki like this one or just something like a gents or any other Tenon saw that's really up to you and a pencil if you need to see your marking lines I'm going to be using the pencil because it's going to be easy for you guys to see it on camera and then a strop and Mel it if you need to have a few Swift wax on the Chisel if possible it's better not to but it's always nice to have a mallet or a hammer around for that purpose I've just got a bit of scrap here so let's jump in we'll get marking it out and then we'll cut it and do everything mainly with the Chisel so let's get to work as we know Dano is somewhere within the middle of the board so since this is just a piece of scrap I'm going to do it right in the middle here is if we're using it for some sort of a shelf the thing thickness when you're actually going to be doing that would be whatever the thickness of the board is minus maybe a millimeter of what board you're going to be putting into this dado in this case I'm just going to make an arbitrary size maybe the the width of my chisel just to make it that little bit easier to demonstrate but you'll make it whatever the thickness is of that board so since this is this piece of scrap I don't have many I don't really have any references on this this is Square enough it's flat enough that I can use it but obviously if you're doing a natural project you're going to have your reference Edge you're most likely doing this on your reference face so make sure you're using proper technique with the square and I'll leave that video down below along with the video of introducing these joints so if you need them you'll find them down below this first Mark and then I'm just going to as I suggested arbitrarily use my chisel so I've got a little Mark just here Light Pass medium pass heavy pass standard now pencil that in so you guys can see it and now that should be pretty easy for you guys to see just there you also want to determine your depth now quite often that is about the third of the thickness of the board and you can just sort of if you look here you can just kind of eyeball it and go all right that's where it is a 19 millimeter board I tend to do about five mil um maybe six depends but generally a third is the rule to do this marking here so I'm just going to go with whatever this is here now and we'll transfer that to the other side just using a little finger gauge there so now we need to mark this now the easiest way to mark that is using a marking gauge and if you've got a marking gauge go ahead and use that but I want to show you doing this without using a marking gauge I'm gonna run into that knife Mark that we did before and so I don't like to come too far below my line because I don't like the knife lines there but some people don't mind it but if I can I'm going to avoid going right through so I'm going to have quite good control just really choking up on my knife like this so I'm only really just using the tip and it gives you much more control over it let me just get it in a position where I can show you guys doing this so I'm lining up on my line here Light Pass medium pass heavy pass and I don't know if you can see that behind the pencil but we've got that marked on there nicely now we're going to go and repeat the process on this side once again into that knife line that was there choke up on it and turn the knife line on this side if you have a little metal ruler like this so I forgot the metal really you can just set it on top like so get it to where you want it really push your thumb down on it stops it moving and I flying across now that we can see this on here we now want to go ahead and saw to these lines now we use the Chisel make a little V Gap back against it to do that and we'll go ahead and do that so let's grab either a gents or are you Japanese so I'm just going to use the gentle because I'm most familiar with that and I find that work pretty well and that's probably the cheapest saw you're going to find it's even cheaper than the Japanese saws so this is most likely what you guys are going to be using in my opinion let me know down below if if you do have the Japanese Suzuki saw but it'd be interesting to know what kind of back Source you guys are using now to do this you want to secure this down now I'm just going to use my dog holes here and and I'm going to use my hold fast which you can see it's just a bent piece of metal that you then smack with a hammer and it wedges it in the hole we'll talk about these a little bit later uh I have talked about them once before if you saw my work holding video but I will cover them again in an upcoming video [Music] now you can just get this one in over this side to hold the far side of it so now we've got this nice and secured so now that I've got this held it is a little more tricky to get in here with the Chisel but what we want to do is do a little relief so we're pushing up against that knife line with our chisel and a lot of people are going to have much flatter angle I like to come in about a 45 degree angle and just push back against that and you can hopefully you can hear as that happens that it's pushing out so now if you don't quite get the material removed and come back in with your knife because you've already got that line there and just put it up against the wall and just bear that waste and you can see that it clears it out nicely come in from the other side and you know that it's going up against that knife line because here that little clunk as it pushes and stops against it foreign now the reason I like to use a nice steep angle when I do that it does give you a slightly better angle against that wall and it means that if your chisel slips you don't end up punching out your material on the other side on your good side so I have had that happen before so now I do a nice steep angle and only remove a little bit of material you don't want to take too much out just like when I showed you how to do the cross cutting and we're going to do a similar technique here so we're going to push the saw in and then we're going to put our finger here and push up against that so this little wall that we've made here or this little knife line the sauce starts in there so we can actually push on the front here with our front finger up against that and we can nibble that slowly move back along that line and because we've got this angle here it's pushing the saw up against that knife line as well and we're just trapping it with our finger here as we come right along now we're established if we look here we're establish right through so now we know that we're right up on that knife line and now we just need to concentrate on the line here not going too far and the line on this side now quite often when I do these um I'm only really citing this side and I every now and then I check that side but you do want to have the lines on both sides when you're doing this because when you come back in with your chisel you need some sort of a reference [Music] so what you've just seen me do here is this line's cut on an angle down to this side and now I'm going to come back up you can turn it around if you're not confident enough but you can bring it down on the angle there and then just make sure that you're straight across so you're essentially creating a little pyramid in the middle and then taking that pyramid down to meet the bottom two corners of your pyramid do the same on this side now obviously I'm not wedging it up against here on this one but that little Gap is really enough and you're just watching that knife line here and just nibbling right on top of it angle that side coming down to align that side and make sure you clear the material out in a minute and double check this one all right so now you might think well we'll just get the Chisel in there and Bash that out if we just came here and tried to bash that out any of you that have used chisels and been doing woodworking for a while will know that that's going to take a lot of effort to bash that out so you're going to have to get your Mallet and get some good wax and it's going to cause chipping of the material so what we're going to do here is add some relief Cuts now usually with something this width of about 12 mil I would probably just put one relief cut but if you're not confident and you want to make it a little bit easier you could actually drop two relief Cuts in here so let's do that [Music] foreign material that are a lot smaller to take out with the Chisel at the start I try not to use the Millet if I can and if you've got a nice sharp chisel I just came down a very small amount there maybe a few millimeters and just started pushing if you need a little bit more power to take that out you can you can actually tap the back of your chisel right here but with these small reliefs you can actually just push it through and you've already got this cut here so it shouldn't last out past that but if you are worried you can even from this fixed position coming in and do just a couple of little pushes from this side and obviously you want to choke right up if you're doing this so you've got like a finger stop like this so you're just punching that little bit out because ideally you want to keep turning this around so I'm just going to keep moving this material here until I'm down onto my line which is right here now so now what we want to do is try and keep this as flat as possible work it right through and then clear this waste out and we want to turn this around so I'm looking at the line on this side now purpose I'm just going to secure one and use the back of this as a stop to make it a little easier just to take one in and out so we want to come down like this and you can see the back of this is obviously flat and you wanna just work it right through and then if you've got any little bits in the corner here you can actually run your chisel flat on these sides like this or bring it in like this if you need to but come down to the line on this side and you can see that I'm actually already on the line this side to kind of split the line on this side just where the pencil happened to be on this side I have no pencil so if we take a quick look at this you can see down to the line there down to the line there a square on here we're fairly square right through from the corner to the corner but and I can't really show you this on the camera it's a little bit undercut in the center but that doesn't matter just like when you do dovetails undercutting in the middle means nothing really it's just whether it's going to look nice and neat out on these outside edges which is what you want so there you have it folks that's actually as easy as it is to actually do a dado using hand tools and you can see just with the Chisel that it was pretty quick and easy for something this thickness doing a day though now if you've got something a lot wider the Chisel does become a little less accurate and you are relying a lot more in the middle to actually have to turn your chisel over the other way to actually chisel that material out and that becomes a little bit of an issue you could use a longer reach chisel if you've got something like a pairing chisel and they have really long reach you could use something like that to clean that waste or you could use specialty tools such as something like I have here which is a router plane now we will introduce this later on and I'll show you the uses for something like this and it's really amazing what the router plane can do in terms of helping out because you have a fixed point you then can get that same thickness right through something like a groove or a dado and it just means it's that much easier if you're doing most of the process by hand touch on this a little later on but for this this is all I wanted to cover so if you like this video and you like how simple quick and easy it was to actually make this data with hand tools then please like And subscribe down below it really does help the channel out and if you'd like to support me a little bit further please consider giving a super thanks to this video if you got some value out of it or maybe checking out my patreon you can find that link down in the description as well so if you like this video and you'd like to see some more videos like this please check out the video up here where I go through making the half lap joint once again because it's very similar to this so I really want you to check that video out and I'll leave the playlist to the beginner Series right up here as well bye for now

Channel: Aussie Woodshed

Views: 1,502

Keywords: aussiewoodshed, Handtool woodworking, Hand-tool woodworking, Restorations, furniture builds, tutorials, woodworking, Handtools, Hand tool, Hand Tools, How to, howto, how-to, cut, dado, stopped dado, joinery, joint, wood, tools, woodwork, hand, carpentry, workshop, tool, blade, building, saw, hand tool (product category), chisel, handtool woodworking, woodshop, hand tool woodworking, traditional woodworking, wood working

Id: 2PBYa9Lr1gA

Length: 17min 31sec (1051 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 13 2023