Finishing a Bridle Joint on a Bandsaw

I'd like to show you how to make a bridle joint using my bandsaw fence. Half of this joint is going to be made on the table saw, that will be this part, a couple of dado cuts, the other part is made on the bandsaw. Here's how the joint goes together. Nice tight fit. Very strong joint.

Let's see if I can get it apart. Here we go. Slides right apart. The dado cuts are quite simple, they can be any depth you want. The distance between them is critical, it has to be the same as the mating piece, the thickness of the mating piece that is.

This has to be able to fit in there, just like that. And of course they have to be exactly opposite of each other. Simple to make. This is the more difficult cut to make, although on this fence it's gonna be a cinch. You've got two long cuts to make and then a flat bottom to cut.

Here's how you get set up. First, we're gonna need to determine the distance of the notch from one side, just draw a line. This is our stop line and that will be the same as the thickness of this piece. Now in cutting out this notch, we're gonna make one cut here, one cut here, on two separate settings of the bandsaw fence, which is a little tricky to do. So I'm using scrap wood first to determine where each cut should be and then after I make the first cut, I cut the real wood.

Make the second cut on the scrap piece, substitute the real wood. So here we go. Let's set up the first cut by placing the board right on the blade and snugging the fence up to it. Just like so. Clamp the fence in place so it doesn't move.

And we'll just make a cut right down to the bottom of the stop line. There we go. So at this point I would say fine, just do that on your real wood too, that will be A okay. Next we're going to determine where the second cut should be. I'm gonna place the top half of the bridle joint above this like that so that's where the cut goes.

The distance between these two lines has to equal the thickness of what's left on this piece. And it's gotta be a pretty close cut so you got a nice, tight fit. And here's where setting the fence takes a little experimentation. So to reiterate, this is a test piece. We can easily move the fence over till we get the blade just inside that pencil line.

Tighten it down like this. And then I'm just gonna make a short cut and then I'm gonna compare it to what we've got and make any adjustments necessary after that. Here we go. A short cut on our scrap piece. Place the other half of the bridle join on top of it.

Just eyeball one side. Look at the other and just say, "Oh, you know what, that looks pretty good." I think I can go with it. It's easy to move the fence one way or the other. And it's also easy when you use a fence to make a bandsaw cut that's just slightly one side or the other of the curve. You can cut half the width of the blade on a bandsaw as long as you have a fence to guide the blade.

Okay. So let's finish out that cut, go to the bottom of the stop cut line here. Okay. So it's two perfectly parallel cuts. We have a lot of waste to remove.

There's a lot of ways you could do it, but I'm just gonna continue using the bandsaw. You could drill it out I suppose. But just let me move this over here and make some curved wasting cuts. So what I'm left with at this point is a pretty raggedy edged bottom, obviously that's not gonna do. You notice I stopped about a 32nd to a 16th of an inch short of my pencil line.

And here's the trick to making a totally flat bottom to this joint, that is that I'm gonna use the bandsaw in a rather unorthodox way, I'm going to move the stock side to side, like this. How do you do that so it makes a really straight line? This thing slides right? Back and forth? No problem.

Get these waste pieces out of the way. I'll show you how this works. Basically we're just gonna nibble away at this thing, taking a very little bit off at a time. The first thing I need to do is to set up a stop block on the fence, so I don't over cut past my base line here. So if I push this right up here to the base line, slide the fence over, there, that's as far as I wanna go with any cut.

Putting a fence, a stop here, will prevent me from going to far. I should point out to you though that I've cut a notch in this fence so that if bandsaw dust accumulates at the end of the cut it doesn't prevent me from going all the way up to the pencil line. Let's place this over here on the fence, butt it up against the board, clamp it, like so, now I want to withdraw this a little bit and I only take a little bit off at a time going side to side. Here's how it works. Well, I see that it's not cutting quite deep enough so I need to stop the saw, readjust the stop block, and make a final cut all the way across.

Here we go. Let me push that right back to the beginning. And I need to have a small gap between this board and this stop a little bit, so if I just withdraw that a little bit, there that should do it. So now we'll go right down to the line. So here we go, a perfectly square, straight bottom.

This would be hard to any other way. But that's what's gonna make the joint nice and tight.