No thanks Festool, I'll keep my $1,500

hey guys I'm over at Lincoln Street Woodworks this is my buddy John I don't have a domino and I wanted to try one so he let me check this thing out what else is this do John oh that's it that's it nothing else hmm before we get started I want to make sure everybody understands I'm not picking on Festival they make really high quality tools but for me to spend 12 to 1500 on a tool that's single purpose is probably not in my decision making Dynamic so I challenged myself to build an inexpensive homemade device that could do even more than the Festool not just make you know a few different size slots but something that had functioned Beyond just making mortises and I'm really excited to tell everybody it succeeded beyond my expectations in The Woodworking world this concept isn't anything new especially in the professional woodworking World horizontal slot mortising machines can be found all over the place what is new about this is that we built this entire thing for under a hundred dollars we used some miscellaneous scrap plywood that was laying around our shop a 49 router some inexpensive bits and 12 to 14 dollars in knobs to build this so this is well under a hundred dollars to build this entire project let's start with the bad first of all this is nowhere near as portable as a domino you have to bring the work to the tool and the dust collection well there is none but there are some pretty good things about it too we'll save those for the end of the video for those of you who are wondering yes there'll be plans available for this and if you're interested you can build yourself one and save yourself fourteen hundred dollars that's a lot of money [Music] this whole project started out as more of an experiment than anything else I wanted to test the efficacy of using plywood dovetail slide system instead of buying expensive linear rails or trying to modify some Hardware [Music] the dovetail slides worked fantastic and the whole project just exceeded any expectations now we're going to try something a little bit different with this video I'm not going to talk through the whole thing I'm going to let you focus on the actual build there will be a few talking points throughout the video but nowhere near as many as normal so this video is kind of Performing two experiments at once first of all the build and secondly if anybody out there likes this kind of format and if you do prefer it let me know down in the comment section I'll shut up now [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] so this is the base of our system these are going to be the sliders for our system and this is going to be how we Mount material on it now I'm building this a little oversized I designed something like this a few days ago and I really didn't like the way it was going so I decided best just to build one and we'll learn as we're building it [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] foreign foreign so off camera we finished up this handle and that moves the router carriage or where the router Carriage sits in and out now that's going to plunge the router bit into the material now we need to make something that slides this back and forth and I had a different idea in my head when we started but this is why we prototype it didn't work out or it wasn't going to work out after I thought about it more so I want to do something similar to this with this but to do that I need a platform off to the side that I can mount everything to to make it all move like it's supposed to now if I would have three model it or thought of it before I could have just made my little angled pieces here that hold that dovetail slide in longer and I could have mounted it here sometimes you just got a shift when things aren't going the way you want them to this will work though [Applause] that'll do it foreign foreign [Applause] [Music] all right [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] foreign foreign [Music] [Music] assistant foreign all right I'm going to jump back in here so to determine the size of our mortise I'm just making two lines on the material on both the rail and style and I'm going to lock the piece down to the match fit top and then line the router bit up with those two lines foreign with both my start and stop positions locked in place I lower the router bit down to where I want the router bit to engage the material foreign [Music] for the second cut I just move the router all the way to one end of the cut line up the matching line to that router bit and then clamp it in place and cut the next mortise off camera we made some tenons and I'll talk about that in here in a minute but matching this way or lining everything up this way worked really really well and I gave myself just about a sixteenth of wiggle room One Direction or the other and everything lined up perfectly now when it comes to cost savings or something I really wanted to try with this project and that's using Straight bits to cut the mortises I got some really inexpensive straight bits from Harbor Freight and I bought some longer ones to test as well off of Amazon and they worked really well now you can't go quite as aggressive only about an eighth or maybe a little bit more than an eight deep per pass but they worked really well and the thing that I really like about that is that these are sharpenable so not only are they inexpensive but they're going to last a lot longer than a spiral bed cut quality as long as you're not going too aggressive is going to be really good as well [Music] more importantly than the cost Savings of the straight bit is that they're available in a lot more sizes than spiral bits are and that will all fit into a quarter inch Chuck on the trim router so I can go up to 5 8 of an inch and two inches long to get those mortises as deep as I need them to be foreign is just over two and a half inches of cut capacity with a quarter inch shaft to fit in the trim router and a 3 8 diameter I ordered some of these because I wanted to test those deeper mortises for wider boards and it worked really well [Music] another thing I wanted the longer bits for were doing step through grooves and that'll all make sense here as you watch this in this cut sequence now this is for a 3 8 bolt and this is an idea for a project I have coming down the pipe but again I use the Straight bits and they performed really well so I don't have to spend a bunch of money on the big spiral bits to get good performance foreign [Music] the dovetail slides on this are working absolutely fantastic one of the concerns I had was buildup of you know sawdust and stuff getting under them but that has not been an issue at all and we've used it extensively really happy with the way that's working and one of the really nice things about this is if over time they start loosening just putting a clamp on here pulling these screws out and changing the screw position tightens them back up again so this is going to be functional for many years to come another thing that was really handy this machine also does is doweling so we just set up a stop position on both sides and drilled some holes and used it for dowels instead of doing dominoes which the Domino can't do so you can do doweling with this as well you see this little spacing in these homemade dominoes that we cut we thought that's pretty important so when there's the glue on the bottom of the hole and we push down the glue squeezes out through those little grooves making sure there's plenty of glue surface to make them was really simple we resawed some material on the bandsaw use the planer to get it to the thick thickness we wanted and then rounded over the sides and use what's called a wavy router bit to put these little grooves in and that worked absolutely perfect another thing that we did off camera is make some accessories for the snatchfit top I have this little match fit on the bottom and a piece of material that slides in that Groove that keeps everything nice and square so when I slide it into place so I can just use this as my registration point I also added some small toggle clamps to another match fit fixture so I can hold material up against the fence if I want to do elongated grooves or pass-throughs these are working really nice now I couldn't be happier with this build and I have more ideas for this but quite frankly the video is getting pretty long and this seems like a good time to call our quits there are plans available in the description box below now I want to make it clear that I have intentions of upgrading this anytime I do make an upgrade I'll make sure that the plans are available to anybody who's already purchased the plans free of charge that about wraps it up for this video I hope that you enjoyed it I'm interested in your feedback what did you think of the long form content without all the talking points did you like that whole thing or not let me know down in the comment section below be sure to check out the plans and we'll see you in the next video

Channel: izzy swan

Views: 1,055,500

Keywords: How to, diy, tablesaw, table saw, tools, projects, woodworking, shop projects, jigs, band saw, Izzy swan, festool domino, Homemade Tool, homemade tools for workshop, diy shop projects, shop projects wood, mortise and tenon, mortising jig, loose tenon, floating tenon, slot mortiser, festool domino connector system, mortising jig loose tenon, diy wood shop projects

Id: mf9un8C6mSg

Length: 23min 49sec (1429 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 03 2023