Biscuit Joiner: Outside Corners and T Joints

I wanna put a cabinet together that when it's done, it's gonna look kind of like that. That's the top of my cabinet and this, that's a shelf in the middle of the cabinet. And I wanna do this with biscuits. And what I like about this exercise and this opportunity to teach you about biscuit joiners is that the way we do this joint and the way we do that joint are completely different uses, uses of a biscuit joiner. So here's how this is gonna go.

We're gonna do the easy one first. When I'm making this 90 I'm gonna position the parts, do a layout line for a biscuit, do a layout line for a biscuit. I want my biscuits every 6 to 8 inches or so. As far as this distance goes, you just need to be far enough in from the edge that, you know, the biscuits not gonna show out here and then to cut these, this is easy, peasy, always secure the work. So, you know, it's not gonna move while you're cutting.

I'm the biscuit joiner. I'm set on the fence for three quarter inch thick material. Make sure your hand isn't behind the work where possibly the cutter could exit. Now, it's important when I made this cut, the fence was registered on the outside edge of the whole cabinet. So when I make this cut, we need to do this, the exact same way, we need to keep the same registration points for both of these cuts.

So on that case side, the fence was resting on the outside of the cabinet, top edge of the piece right there. I'm still resting on the outside face of the cabinet. Now let's do that t joint in the middle. We got one of these. We've got one of these and the starting point is pretty much the same, which is I'm on my pencil line.

I'm on the layout line on my side. Let's do a biscuit and a biscuit. But the manner in which we cut him is different. We're gonna take the fence out of the equation altogether. On biscuit joiners, one thing most manufacturers have done is taken into account that we work with three quarter inch stock stock a lot.

So the distance from the bottom of the plate here to the center of the cutter is 3/8 of an inch. So the way that comes into play right now is for the shelf, we don't, can a lever it over the edge. We don't let the fence rest on this face. We do. Yes.

And this, so now what I'm doing by letting this be secured to the bench. This rest on my bench. In this case, I'm not registering off of here. I'm registering off the bottom face of this component. Then to keep that theme going, we're done with that guy.

We bring in this guy. Now you need a piece of scrap. This is gonna act as a fence there. So remember when I put my shelf on here, it was sitting on that pencil line. So the bottom face of that piece was on that pencil line.

Now, that piece of scrap is on the pencil line. Now, my biscuit joiners on that pencil line because it's up against that fence. I can see my layout line. A thing to watch out for here is don't let gravity get this away from you, which is when I'm in the right position and I'm ready to cut, make sure this hasn't just like sagged on those springs and is touching the face of the plywood right now because when you turn it on, it'll jump a little bit. So I'm up off the surface, but I'm on my pencil line when I bring these together that positions the bottom face of this fixed shelf right on that layout line that we created earlier, the position for the shelf.

And then of course, up here on the top that goes there that goes there, get rid of the sawdust and that's gonna make these flush on the outside face right there. So one cabinet one project two distinctly different applications for the biscuit joiner to make sure that we get the component in the right spot. By in this case, registering off the bottom of the biscuit joiner. And this in this case registering off the fence on the biscuit joiner.