I Have Dadoed

I spent like an hour and a half playing with my tools tonight, and here is the result:

That is a planing sled. You put crooked lumber on it, use the triangular pieces of wood to adjust it, and run it through a thickness planer. For thin wood, this works like a jointer, except that you have to finish the edges with another tool, like a table saw or router.

The idea comes from a woodworker named Keith Rust. I used his plans, which you can find somewhere at Taunton.com. His sled was different. He used plywood, because he happened to have it on hand, and his sled was five feet long, because the sheet of plywood he used happened to be that long. I had MDF, so that’s what I used. And because I had no flat wood to use between the sheets of MDF, I had to buy some oak. But the idea is the same.

Look at all the stuff I did! The first time I worked on this, I ripped two sheets of MDF on my table saw, and I used various drills and drivers to put everything together, along with my unbelievably cool Irwin clamps. Today, I did everything you see on top of the MDF.

I only used two cutting tools: the table saw, and the 10″ miter saw. And with them, I made 1″ square supports from a scrap two-by-four, eight quarter-inch dadoes in the supports, and eight 1/4″ wedges cut at 15 degrees.

The table saw is fantastic. I can see why woodworkers like Kelly Mehler and Doug Stowe like it so much. It’s as big as a house, and it has a 5-horsepower motor, but you can easily do work with tolerances of much less than a millimeter! And there’s very little setup. You just fire it up and go. And unlike a router, it’s trustworthy and cooperative. Routers like to bite your work and shift around. They’re a lot harder to use well.

I started by making the supports. I ripped a two-by-four down to one inch in height, and then I peeled two one-inch strips out of it. Then I had to figure out how to make the dadoes. I finally decided to rip a piece of long scrap at 15 degrees, rest it on a miter gauge, clamp other scrap to it, and use the result as a sled. Those Irwin clamps are perfect for this purpose. They’re strong, but they’re so small you can put three of them on a gadget like this without worrying that they’ll be in the way of the saw.

I clamped a stop block on the sled, made initial cuts, put a 1/8″ thick piece of aluminum against the sled’s stop block, and ran the supports through again. This gave me two 1/8″ cuts in each support, joining to form a 1/4″ dado which crossed through the supports at just the right angle.

I had no 1/4″ thick lumber, so I sawed a two-by-four down until it was narrow enough to resaw, and I ripped two 1/4″ sheets off of it. Then I cut them in two, stacked them, and cut wedges from the stacks using the miter saw. I was able to cut four wedges at a time. Keith Rust used a band saw and a jig, but I have no band saw.

The rest of the job is trivial, to steal a phrase from math and physics. I have to screw in some hooks, add grippy stuff to the wedges and supports, and cut very simple dadoes in the supports. I forgot to cut those tonight. I could pop them out on the router in a hurry. I also have to add some adjustable screws to hold the wedges in place.

Man, what a sense of satisfaction I feel. I lacked the tools you would ordinarily use to do the things I did, but part of the beauty of woodworking is using the innate versatility of your saws and drills and routers to overcome challenges like those. And the whole point of making this thing is to enable me to use one tool to do the work of another. I’ll be making straight stock with a thickness planer.

This was a good day, all around. My sister called just to thank me for cooking, and she said it was the best birthday she could remember. She said I should market my cheesecake. I reminded her that in a way, I already had. It’s in a book, after all.

I have my eye on a band saw, but it’s too big. Some guy on Craigslist is apparently dissolving his business; he has a bunch of tools for sale. One is a big Shop Fox 19″ saw. What I really want is a 16″ or 17″ saw, and I’d love to get my hands on a Walker Turner. But if a bigger saw comes along, and it’s cheap and local, why not get it? The floor area it will take up is about the same, and it will be more versatile and last longer.

I think a band saw will round out my wood tools very well. There are a lot of little things that are hard to cut safely on a table saw or miter saw.

Dust collection doesn’t seem to be as much of a problem as I thought. As long as I’m willing to wear a mask and drag the shop-vac around, I don’t make an unmanageable mess, and I don’t breathe in much crap. Maybe I don’t need a cyclone. Maybe a regular old dust collector with a very long hose will work, as long as the motor is big enough to overcome the resistance from the hose.

Tomorrow I fully expect to prepare a piece of wood to be made into a box. I am not willing to blow a lot of money, so I may use scrap spruce or go get a piece of cedar at Home Depot. As always, you will be informed of all the fascinating developments.