Make a Jig for a Half-Lap Joint

To do half lap joints on the table saw one way that you can do it, is to pass the material vertically over the saw blade, making a cut this direction, then later come back make a cut in this direction. And that reveals the half lap that allows us to put the pieces together. We can't just pass material vertically over the saw blade 'cause it would be very unsafe. So we need some kind of a jig to hold everything and that's what we're gonna do here is make a very very simple jig. You need to cut some parts and get those parts together so we can start on assembly.

I've made mine out of an oak veneered plywood piece doesn't matter too much what it is but the pieces need to be nice and flat. You need to be very careful when you cut them that the ends are all nice and square. So be real careful with that set up. This piece will end up being my vertical component here on the blade side. It's six inches wide, 16 inches long.

There's gonna be a rail that eventually gets fastened to the back of it like this, inch and a half wide, 14 inches long. Now these other parts are gonna be source specific so you're gonna have to do a little figuring and on your own. We need a piece that's gonna go on this side of the fence, still six inches wide and about an eighth of an inch taller, than your fence is high. And then finally, when we put this all together, this piece is gonna bridge from the back of our vertical, to the top of this vertical, so it's still gonna be six inches wide. It needs to be long enough that it can span the width of your fence and slightly overlay, slightly go pass the piece we've got vertically over here.

So get your parts together, then come back and here's what we're gonna do. To assemble, we're gonna take the vertical piece from the right side of the fence, make it flush with the bottom of the vertical piece from the left side and trace the top edge. Then I'm gonna bring that line around to that edge and to this edge so that I can see it when I wanna use it. Now what's gonna happen is, we're gonna fasten our horizontal piece to the top side of that pencil line just like that. I'm gonna put everything together with glue and with staples.

If you don't have a staple gun, you could glue it and screw it. You could glue it and brat it. Once the glue grabs, it's all about the glue but staples make it very fast and very easy to get our parts put together. Now for our next trick, we're going to get some glue on top of this piece and position that on the right side of the surface. Now when you do this step, we wanna give this just a little bit of a squeeze.

Because when you're using this jig, we don't want it walking back and forth on the rip fence. So I'm holding this together to put a little bit of pressure on it. Same thing back here, so lets just ride it, moves, but it doesn't wobble. If it's got any wobble in it you're gonna have to go again 'cause we can't have it walking. Now, what could do is quit at this point and you have a wonderful chair for the dolls in your doll collection.

If you wanna keep going with the jig idea, the next thing we're gonna do is put this piece on vertically. With inch and a quarter staples in my gun, I know that there's no danger of them going through when I face staple these pieces. And then our last step, we need a holding downy thingy which a lot of people like to call a toggle clamp. The clamp goes on that clique that we just put on. And that takes care of our building.

Now the way this gonna work is that's gonna go on our fence. Our material will go vertically in the jig, we'll clamp it in place using the toggle clamp, then we can feed that very safely and easily over the saw blade to do tenons or half lap joints. Works really well and as you can see, very simple to put together a great addition to have for your table side.