I’m making new kitchen cabinet doors and drawer fronts and am getting ready to plow dadoes in 180 stiles and rails. The dadoes will not only house the door panels but, on the stiles, will also serve as mortises. Each dado will be 1/4” wide and 3/8” deep.
Here are my questions: To cut the dadoes, should I use my dado set or just use a saw blade with a flat kerf? If the latter, what brand, configuration, and tooth count would you recommend?
Thanks in advance.
Replies
If you have one, use a router table. You'll be able to get a bit of the exact width of groove you want and a good bit will cut very cleanly. But more to the point, you'll be able to do stopped grooves if you need them.
Lataxe
180 parts screams dado set over single blade. Think about how many extra passes you'll have to make. Also dust in the air goes up ALOT on the extra passes. Featherboards will help a ton.
I also agree that if you have a router table, go that way! With a good cabinet door bit set you can cut the dados and the tenons on the ends of the rails.
But, if not, I'd definitely go dado over single blade as well!
Technically speaking a dado can be identified as a groove...but not all grooves are dados.
There's your morning mindbender.
Router table first choice. Then dado blade
No brainer for me - Dado.
No way I'm running that much wood through a screaming router. Without a power feeder no way.
Be sure to set up feather boards.
My makeshift "router table" is just a hobbled-together board with a 35 year old fixed base router attached to the underside; it "screams" like the one described by RobertEJr and doesn't have a power feeder. I'd be willing to give it a shot and upgrade my router bits in the process were it not for the dado option, which is readily available to me. And, for this project, I don't need stopped dadoes.
It sounds like using the dado blade is much preferred over the flat-kerfed saw blade because of the number of passes required, the dust production, and the ability to reliably dial in the width. I still intend to make two passes per piece, so that the dado is centered. I think I can get away with no feather board (I don't have one) by setting the blade to cut the "outside" side of the dado with the piece snugged up to the fence, and then turning the piece around to cut the other side. That way, if the piece for some reason wanders away from the fence, the cut will still be in the area I intended to cut out anyway.
I have a couple of suggestions.
First, centering the dado isn't that important. What's more important is making sure the back of the panel isn't proud of the rails and stiles. If you're using 1/2" ply for the panels and back cutting the rabbets to fit the dado, you want to be about 1/16" shy of back of the door. That way you can sand the doors without accidentally sanding the plywood panel.
Second, using a cope and stick set (rail and stile cutter) will be infinitely easier than using a table saw with a dado stack. With a table saw you'll have to run all your stiles on end which isn't ideal, and you'll have to be absolutely precise that the dado depth is the same as your stub tenon length, otherwise you'll show gaps either at the joint or on the end grain.
Furthermore, your stub tenon length need to be established in advance to get a proper door measurement. 1/32" tenon error on a set of double doors will mean 1/8" off in total. A cope and stick set has a fixed stub tenon length you can bank on. 13/32" for a freud shaker set.
Just my opinion, but cutting tenons on the table saw is likely to be difficult to do accurately for 100+ rails. Dust alone can screw you up by 1/64th
infinity tools offers a 1/4" kerf blade. I use this all the time. Flat bottom and no set up time. I use it with a zero clearance insert so little to no tear out.
Thanks, everyone, for all the tips. I'll give the cope and stick approach some attention on my next project. And it's good to know about what Infinity Tools offers.
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