Guest Posts

Pennsylvania Spice Cabinet – Part 05

This is a Guest Post from fellow woodworker, Jeremy Pringle.

If you have any comments or questions, feel free to use the forms below this entry.

Thanks for sharing your project with us Jeremy!

Well, now that we have done some marking and measuring, and some sawing…

we can now cut some joinery.

Finally, some dovetails right?

WRONG!

Dovetails are so boring…

and everyone does them.

Besides, we have not done any chiseling exercise yet.

(I promise, I will do a much more in-depth DT entry when we get to the drawers)

Instead, something a little more fun and interesting…

Stopped dado’s!!!

After using dividers to mark out the locations for the dado’s (part 2), I laid out my tools.

Even though I used a pencil to do my layout, I used a knife and a straight edge to scribe my lines.

This gives me a clean splinter free shoulder and a true definition line.

Knife

I then used a chisel to clean a small amount of the waste out to define a shoulder on the inside (waste) of the dado.

Shoulder ( chisel )

It is not really necessary, but I really like my router plane, so I use it to clean out and further define the shoulder.

Shoulder ( router plane )

This shoulder allows me to have something for the saw to sit in so I can saw down to my depth without jumping out and messing up my sharp shoulder.

Saw cut

Then of course, back to the router plane to take small incremental cuts and work my way to the bottom of the dado’s.

Don’t forget to set your depth stop, so all your dado’s are the same depth.

I like to make my dado’s slightly undersized, this way I need to plane my panels to fit.

I can always plane them to fit but I can’t make the dado smaller if I make them too big.

Installed

Once again, I want to remind you all that there are many ways to make stopped dado’s.

I could have just used the knife and router plane, or just the chisel….

How do you make your stopped dado’s?