Quick Build for a Perfect Router Dado Jig to make Dado Joints

hello everyone i'm colin connett i know some of you are wondering what kind of a contraption is colin making today well this is a jig for making perfect dado cuts if you're making a shelving unit or bookcases and you want to put some cut dados in the sides and you want nice accurate and nice tight fitting dados this little jig won't take you long to make and it'll give you perfect results so stick around let me show you how we make this [Music] okay these are all the components that i'm working with i'm going to move these out of the way because i'm going to talk about those in a little bit so the three main components that i have are the base and because this is used plywood i sanded the bottom of this one so that it's a bit stickier it doesn't slide so easy this one it doesn't matter i want to put this underneath because when i get finished this is going to be the square so i'll be able to take that and put it right on a piece of wood and i know that it's square now the next thing we need to do is we need to make a measuring cut in our scrap base here that we're going to be making so what i need to do i've already installed a 3 8 bit in my router and i've already taken this is where i wanted to tell you about these pieces that i have here now when we make this jig what we need to do we need to compensate for the thickness of the bit and if you're going to be using a quarter inch bit you'll need an exact quarter inch matching piece of wood in this case i'm using a 3 8 bit so i've got a 3 8 strip of wood and it's going to be i'm going to use it to tuck that in there to to compensate for the thickness of the blade now here's what's going to happen now i've taken a moment to fasten my base carcass down to my bottom sheet that i'm going to be doing my test cuts on there's my 3 8 strip now i'm going to be making a test cut with the 3 8 strip on there and i've already set the depth of the rotor and i'm going to be using what i'll call the back of the router if you will the rounded area now most routers also have a flat area and a lot of you are going to be wondering why wouldn't you use the flat area well here's the reason why i've learned the hard way that when you use the the flat edge as long as you absolutely keep it straight it works fine but when you're pushing a router and you're moving around sometimes the bit wants to wander when you use the back uh the the straight edge part like that look at how much the router can go out of alignment whereas when you're using the back you can move the router back and forth and the bit doesn't go out of alignment so it's a lot safer in some instances to use the back of your router so i've already preset the depth i'm going to go ahead and cut that first little cut and then i'll show you what the next process is now there's my first cut and what i want to do now is take this little 3 8 strip out of there and remember this was the thickness of the bit what i'm going to do i want to cut a three-quarter inch slot so i'm putting my three-quarter inch bar in there and i'm going to make another cut and you'll be able to see what that looks like so there was the first cut that i made and you can see if you look carefully you see there's just a little tiny wisp of of wood in there and that's that's actually good that means we're very accurate because this is a 3 8 bit and if i use it twice it should give me a three-quarter inch wide slot now if i take my three-quarter inch board and put that in there look at that it's a perfect fit so what i need to do now is take those measurements and move them from here to here so i actually want the very center and i happen to have there's a you can see there's a little point there and that little point is four and or sorry three and five eighths so three and five eighths is the center line so what i want to do now i'm going to cut this to that width because this is going to be by measure my middle marker 3 and 7 8 and then i'll be attaching the hinges on each side okay i wanted to make this cover board just a tiny bit longer because it's going to be the marking board and i've also made it a tiny bit shy and that's so that i can put some veneers in there like that so that when i put the hinges on there's a tiny bit of a gap in there in case we ever get some sawdust or something down in there and i'll take those and align those like that so i'm just going to go off camera and just take a moment and attach those hinges well look at what happens when you look around i actually found some still in a package even if i can get them out and they'll be they're a little bit smaller so they're going to be even better there we go yeah that's better these were just stiff i just you know if you're going to make something like this you want to have decent hardware for it so all right so that's good okay those hinges are on there perfect okay i'm all set up here to do our test cut so i'm just going to draw a line on there and it's just so i can see where it is i probably would have drawn that line earlier what i would do is just be lining up this to that so if i had a long board here i would be drawing the lines for each shelf at different intervals now what i also want to do we're going to do what's called a stop dado and the reason we do a stop dado is so that we can hide this is going to be my new shelf here so i think that's a half inch and we're going to put that in there and we don't want the shelf to show at the front of our carcass so what we do we drop the router bit down there and we wrote all that out then at the front of this we just cut a little notch like that and that fits in there like that so that it hides that little joint in there so i'm going to go ahead and do that now we're going to start off with our 3 8 strip and that's that one right there and i've also made a cutoff strip from the from the shelf this is what would be an off cut so i'll be using that in a moment as well okay there's our cleaned out slot i've cleaned some of the sawdust out of it now we're taking out our 3 8 strip now this was to compensate for the the router bit and this is our now our finished piece so we're going to do another strip now and when we get finished that should fit in there perfectly tight [Music] yeah there we go that fits in there just nice now the next thing we want to do to make this a little piece fit in here you can see at the front here what i want to do is i'm going to cut that little piece out and we'll do this i'm going to cut this off camera and then i'm going to cut another little strip down like that cut that out of there and that should fit on there perfectly so i'm just going to do that off camera and then i'll come back and we'll test that okay so there's that little notch and you always leave the line there and it doesn't you don't even need to square this off i used to square that if you don't even need to do that because you're all going to hide it all anyway but watch how that joint hides in the front of that and you get a nice clean there you go you get a nice clean joint in the front and that's what that would look like so in this case the shelf would be sitting like this and that would be the edge of your shelf and that's what that would look like and that's just how easy it is to make really good quality edges and good tight fitting shelves on things like a bookcase if you're making a bookcase or making shelving that's exactly the kind of thing now you could use plywood for something like this and just put it there's all sorts of different edging that you could put on that or you could be using natural wood or you could be using a combination of two of them and this is the jig that will allow you to do that so you'll have your for a bookcase for example you'll have your two gable sides and you'll mark off where you want your shelves to be this is what you will align to each one of those lines then you just flip that back you'll use your sizing strip first of all with your router just like i did to get the first pass and then whatever the shelving thickness is you'll use that as your second pass and you'll get nice tight fitting shelving in there and if you want to make it look really good you'll do some plunge cuts like i just showed you how to do and that will give you some really good looking shelving that concludes my video for today i'm colin kanat for woodwork web thanks for watching you

Channel: WoodWorkWeb

Views: 179,374

Keywords: dado, dado joint, dados, router dado jig, dado jig, router jig dado, router dado, router, perfect dados, joinery, exact width dado jig, dadoes, perfect dado, dado jig for router, how to cut dados with a router, evenly spaced dados, making dados with a router, router jig, wood router, router jigs, dado with router, dado cuts with router, dados with router, the perfect dado jig, perfect router dado jig, dados with a router

Id: CETqGP1vgBM

Length: 12min 14sec (734 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020