You might think that I could skip laying out the dados to hold the solid panels for the sides, back, and bottom of the nightstands. Just set the router table fence correctly and run all the parts, right? I’m not willing to take that risk. There are 32 dados to cut on the 24 furniture parts pictured below. Some of those parts need dados on multiple faces, and those dados are not always spaced identically. As you can see, there is the potential here for things to get really confusing really fast. Drawing all the dados out ahead of time only took me an hour or so, but it will definitely help to eliminate the confusion.
Drawing the dados is a fairly simple procedure. I started with the legs. The first step is mark where the dado ends. I used a steel rule to mark a final length of 21 1/2″ and my double square to strike a guideline across the the leg at the 21 1/2″ point.
My adjustable double square makes drawing a long dado like this accurately a piece of cake. The dado is 1/4″ wide, so I set the square to 3/4″. Starting at the guideline I just drew, I hold my pencil against the blade and slide the square the length of the leg. Repeating the same operation along the opposite face of the leg completes the dado.
Here you can see two completed dados on adjacent faces of the same leg.
The dados on the other parts are drawn in much the same way. The only difference is that the dado runs the length of the board, so there is no need to strike an end line. Here I am drawing a dado on one of the stretchers.
About an hour later, I have my 32 dados drawn out.
To view the entire Nightstand Project series, please visit my project page.
Nice post Dave. I usually label the hell out of my workpieces just to make sure I don’t mess them up. That includes marking out the joinery. It only takes one dramatic screw up to make you a believer in redundancy. lol. And I see you also enjoy your 4″ square as much as I do!
I learn to mark my joinery on everything. One of the first projects I got when I went to work for a cabinet shop was a complicated entry way in a store in Phoenix. I took over for the another cabinetmaker and he had most of the job cut out, but he didn’t like to mark anything, so I had a mess to work with. It took almost a 1/2 day and then I just made my own cut list and started over. by the end of the day I had a good start. After that I learned to mark every thing you never know if you have to walk away from a project for a while, or pass it off. I know most home woodworkers don’t worry about the passing it off, but you still never know whats going to come up between the planning stage and the execution of it. Good Job
Joey