Rout Evenly Spaced Dadoes
George VondriskaNeed to cut a set of perfectly spaced dadoes? It's easy. All it takes is a little shop math and a shop-made fence. With this technique, once you've accurately cut the first dado, there's no way to mess up the subsequent cuts. Watch and learn.
I had a question from a reader about making perfectly spaced dadoes. What she was working on was a stand that would end up being cubbies for paper above her desk. So she wanted to have just this real typical pigeon hole look of these layers pretty close together. So here's the way to make that happen. Using a trim router, you can use the same technique with any router but it's nice here because the base is small, what we need to know is the distance from the edge of the bit to the edge of the base.
That's gonna be the first step. So we take that measurement, on this particular machine it is an inch and 5/8, okay, store that information away. Now, to cut the very first dado, we're simply gonna clamp a fence in place, I've got marks on the board already telling me where I want the fence to go, lock that down. For the very first one we're gonna have to do that layout, for subsequent cuts it's just gonna get easier and easier as we go. Now what's cool is, we're done with this fence.
this is where we gotta do a little bit of math. I want it to be two and 3/8 inches from here to the next one. So it's an inch and 5/8 from the tip of the cutter to the edge of the base, so the difference between that and my two and 3/8 is 3/4 of an inch. So in other words, take the number, take the spacing that you want, subtract this distance, what that tells you is how big to make this piece. So this is where it's cool, I've got a vertical piece in this L that fits right into the cut I just made, a horizontal piece that's the width I need in order to get the spacing I want, so now, I just clamp my board and we can rout till the cows come home.
Maybe even after the cows come home. Using that L-shaped fence, that locks in to the dado you just did it's absolutely bullet proof, there's no way you can screw this up. So it's a great way to make perfectly evenly spaced, perfectly parallel dadoes on a project, all of it by use of the simple L-shaped fence, makes it all come out perfect.
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Life can be so easy! Great idea. Need to try this asap.
How would we make a l shape fence?
Just makes sense. On an upscaled note, from here you could apply to the spacer a straight-edge that slides out from it to give variable width spacing between routed dados, or be useful for another project needing different spacing. Gives me an idea for a future project. Thanks, George!
Sweet!