Using a Biscuit Joiner: Leg to Rail Offset

I want to put a reveal or an offset between the rail here and the leg here for a project. So gonna do my joinery with a biscuit joiner. One way I could do this would be, one fence setting for all the legs, one fence setting for all the rails. Now what happens in my experience is, I forget a piece or I screw it up later, I gotta come back and try to reset the fence for that component or for the other component. Here's a way that we can do this all with one setting on the fence.

The whole thing relies on a piece of plexiglass. Now the plexiglass part of this is important because we want to be able to see through it. The thickness of the plexiglass is what's gonna create our reveal. Here's how this works. Gonna clamp the leg down to the table and cut that one first.

Where I'm at on the biscuit joiner is that the height of the fence above the cutter is set to my full depth of cut. Other words, this is the setting that's gonna create the reveal I want later. And you'll notice no plexiglass used for that part of the cut. Leg is done. Now we bring in the rail.

Clamp it to the table. Now leave the fence alone and add the plexiglass. And we'll make our cut just like you normally would. And this is where, because it's plexiglass. I can see through it and I can see my layout line right smack through the plexi.

Now while we're still here in the clamp, let me show you how to get the fence location for that cut number one. When you do this, when you set up your fence, put the plexiglass on the rail material, put the fence on there, and then using the index lines on the biscuit joiner, center the slot on the thickness of the material. What I'll do then is adjust my fence up and down until I've got the slot centered on that, in this case, 3/4 inch rail, lock it there, leave it there, use the plexiglass to create the step. Let's see what that step looks like. Insert a biscuit, bring over a leg, put it together.

And there's my reveal, which is the same as the thickness of the plexiglass I use to create it. So a real simple way to get repetitive results and consistently create the same reveal on every corner on your project.