PERFECT MITER JOINTS - Watch Detailed Tutorial and Learn How to Cut Them

[Music] lately I've been working on some box mules for a stair railing I'm working on that's what these are here they essentially act as a post for the handrail to connect to during final installation there'll be some spindles underneath I've made all this starting with rough cherry but this video is all about the installation of these pieces of trim in the panel area there's a lot of trim to go in and the joints have to be quite nice because they're going to be prominent so I'm gonna be showing you how I do this both accurately and in large enough quantity to get the job done so these are some of the pieces of trim I made I just use the scraps left over from the construction of the Newell's themselves so it was a good use of materials made them on the router table and the first step in mitering is to cut one miter on the ends of all of the the pieces of trim the trim turned out pretty well but as with with homemade trim sometimes the ends are a little bit chattery as the bit starts to stabilize so I'm looking for that I don't want to include that that roughness but the first step is is really very simple if my end is good it's good up to about here in this case I'm just going to make the first miter 4hp [Music] so at this stage we've got one lighter cut on a number of pieces so this next step is all about marking and you don't use a pencil the pencil is not precise enough even a sharp pencil you need to use some kind of a utility knife and you always mark each piece to fit a specific spot so theoretically the length of this edge here or I'm going to be putting the trim is the same as the length of this here but in practice there's going to be several thousandths of an inch difference and that's too much so each piece is custom cut and I set the piece in this way touching the outside edge and I make my mark now let me show you what doesn't work as well I could put it in this way and I'd still be registered against the edge of the opening but now it's just a whole lot harder to mark see because I'm I don't have as as neat access with the knife so do it this way put it in tight put the trim against the edge and now you've got everything held nice and solid put the trim or the blade here and just make a little mark it doesn't have to be too big but there's the mark there and that's all we need now in the interests of efficiency I always mark at least two pieces before I go back to the saw you can waste a lot of time walking back and forth with a saw if you don't do at least two at a time so I'm registering the far end against the opening and you know I'm marking it here with the knife and we've got another mark so that one's a little light just gonna make it a bit more prominent and now it's back to the saw now I'm this is the this is the piece that's closest to me so I'm gonna keep that in my left hand and I'm gonna keep this in my right hand so I can remember where they go now one of the things I like about this saw is that the position of the blade is as evident on the workpiece because of the shadow that it casts so this is much better than the laser blade devices because it shows exactly where the blade is because the blade makes the shadow now I need to to swivel this over because my last cut establishing the first miter was in this direction so now I need to swivel the saw over make sure I hit that 45-degree stop now this is where the precision is I'm gonna do this just by talking but can you see there's the there's the saw but there's the knife mark and then there's the shadow of the blade now the shadow of the blade is not very distinct right now because it's not spinning I'm gonna start it spinning and when you do I want you to notice how this far corner of the knife mark I'm going to align it just on the edge of the shadow of the blade so pay close attention to that and that's how I get a precise cut so here we go so that's one gun don't want to waste my trip over to the saw so I'm gonna do that again now I know from experience that if anything these pieces might be slightly too long very a few thousandths of an inch too long my goal is to get them on the right on the first cut to get a perfect fit I definitely don't want to cut them too short because then my piece is ruined at least for long lengths so let's go over and see they should just slip in I would say that was just about perfect and another one just about perfect so I'm not gonna fasten these down yet because I know from experience that I want to make sure that the other pieces are going to fit perfectly before I I nail anything down fasten it permanently occasionally it might happen that you didn't set the saw correctly didn't hit the right detent and so you don't actually have a 45 there you don't want to have to wrestle this piece out after it's more securely installed so next step it's just just like the first step I'm not gonna I'm not gonna mark it this way because that's clumsy I'm gonna turn it around this way so it Nestle's right in it's right in there tight I have to push this down a bit more they're just tight and for market so we got a mark we're gonna do the same thing on the other side because I never go to the saw with less than two pieces to cut there it's tight now since it all comes down to the knife mark I just wound up before I take the piece away I'm gonna make sure that knife mark is in the right place this one's a bit light so I'm going to make it a little more firm now we go back to this off so I've cut these two short pieces now and none of these longer ones are in permanently and they're not even push down all the way I just want to get a sense that they are going to fit finally and when I put this one in can I'd say that's a little on the tight side but I'll be able to tap that in later so I'm not gonna worry about that and then this one here is too tight as I said going back to the saw isn't the greatest thing but it's a lot better than making the piece too short so I always hear a little bit on the side of too long and I have a trick to show you for cutting off just a little bit because it's very easy to go too far and enter Rou in this piece and all the work that you've invested in it but this technique ensures that you don't cut it too short and it has to do with the curve of the blade so the teeth on a blade like this are just a little bit wider than the body of the blade so what I do is without the blade running I push the blade all the way down and then push the piece tight to the body of the blade it's kind of dark in there but it's touching the body of the blade not any of the teeth not pushing really hard I'm just snugging it up to the body of the blade then I'm gonna raise the blade and start it spinning and you'll see that it takes off just the slightest little smidge so yeah we should go back and find that this little piece fits just fine I've never had it over a huge it just takes the slightest little bit off so yeah it's actually just perfect this is a perfect fit occasionally if it's too long for one cut I'll just go back and give it another cut now I know these pieces are going to fit this one actually that's kind of tight I think no I guess we can we can tap that we can tap that so now it comes time for installation what I do here with these longer pieces in a longer panel opening like this is I apply a little bit of glue but only to the bottom edge I don't want to apply a glue here on the side because when I put the trim in and push it down that glues gonna smear and come up and just make a big mess that's gonna be visible but if I put the glue on the bottom like this then the glue is only going to contact the wood of the panel when it's fully sorry about that that was the compressor kicking in compressor for the pin nailer that I'm going to be using to secure this so I don't know strictly speaking the glues not completely necessary but I prefer to use as few metal fasteners as possible and the pin nailer helps to hold things while the glue dries no I can't push that down any further my hand but I've just got a little block of wood here and if I align it correctly I have that trim down nice and tight with everything so all I've got now is my last piece and I just want to double-check yeah that's gonna be a really nice fit it's just a nice sort of just the right level of snugness so I can confidently put some glue on step it in place remember once again no glue back here because that would smear all across the side and it would be visible on this little edge that that remains open so just probably strictly speaking don't need to tap this in gonna do it anyway so there we have okay now there's only one thing left to do as I said I'm gonna secure these with 23 gauge pins they're very small they're the diameter of a sewing needle they have no head so they don't leave much of a mark but they do leave a tiny mark and I find it best if that tiny mark is symmetrical so I'm gonna make small marks two inches from each end of the long piece of trim and then one in the middle it's it's a little thing but keeping the fasteners symmetrical just helps to raise the quality a little bit so here we've got this now if you've never seen 23 gauge pins this is what they look like they're very small I mean this is a whole strip of them and it fires off one at a time in the right kind of gun you can even shoot two inch long pins in hardwood and they don't buckle so we don't need to injures this for this job but I'm gonna do the the middle one first because if the middle one has has always has a little bit of flex in it I can't really do too much to push the ends in but I can push the middle in and I'm going to Center this pull the trigger you know that probably looks more prominent on the camera than it will in real life when everything's all finished and this cherry has darkened up cherry darkens really nicely on its own and exposure to light and when that happens the holes from these pins gonna be pretty well invisible so there you have it trim work done precisely and and fairly quickly with hardwood thanks for watching click here to join the thousands of people who get the Bailey Line Road hands on how to newsletter for free every Saturday morning [Music]

Channel: Bailey Line Road

Views: 1,522,728

Keywords: miter joints, how to cut miters, woodworking tricks, woodworking, DIY, steve maxwell, miter box, mitre joint, cutting wood, woodcut, wood cutting tools, how to cut wood, laser engraver, laser cutter, wood cutting boards, paper cutter, watermelon cutter, wood etching, splined miter joint, miter joint box, miter spline, perfect miter cuts, connecting wood at 45 degree angle, lock miter bit, 3 way miter joint, half lap miter joint, 45 degree wood joint, mitre wood joint

Id: 0wnjJ-Xi5FU

Length: 15min 38sec (938 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 31 2018