Insert our tail board. Well part of interruption but I need to make an error announcement, before you go any further into the video, I just need to clarify something, I did make a mistake and was pointed out to me by a couple of guide on the comments area of the post. And the mistake that I made was I sort of made a rule in the beginning of the pod cast that said, you know, for your – fronts, you always want the pins and for your sides, you always wants your tails that is absolutely true and if you look closely from here on out, you see I did the exact opposite. Not intentionally, I just probably picked up the pieces and I was so focused on filming the pod cast that I just was not paying enough attention. But, the critical thing here is I can go back, I can re-film everything to just make it all perfect but realistically to me, it is more important for you to know that that is a very easy mistake to make. It is a big of a mistake as it is, it is very easy to make it.
The pod cast, this film was actually my destruction, you got a lot of destructions, you know, maybe it is your kids running in and out of the shop, maybe you are still thinking about some crap that happened at work during the week, you know, one thing or another can be on your mind and you should be 100% focused on the task at hand in order not to make those mistakes. And not to mention like I said, if you follow your manual that came with your jig, you should not make this mistake. It was just a silly thing that I did. So I just to post this corrections so there is no confusion, I am not going back in redoing the whole video, I think it is critical that you see that this is a very easy mistake to make. Correcting it just means literally re-cutting your parts and starting over, there is no way to convert a tail board into a pin board unless you happen to cut it extra long.
So, you know, I got a really nice sample drawer here that happens to be a good example of how not to arrange your dovetails. So as you could see, I got the tails in the front, pins on the side and that is the opposite of what we want. So, enjoy the video, do not let that distract you, the core points that I have made in this video are still in tact and that is what you need to pay attention to.
Now, we are going to cut our tailboards and we have that tear out issue again that we have to be concerned with so I am going to start by placing a backer board into this top of clamping bar here and this is going to be a support, it is going to support the back of our work piece so that as the router becomes through, those fibers are completely supported. And so I want to clamp in my tail piece into the jig, I am going to move this backer piece all the way forward, okay, you see the little gap here, you want to close up that gap, you want to make sure we have full contact between the backer piece and our tailboard.
Now, to set the height of the bit on the router, we first have to mark the thickness of our side board into our front piece or in this case, this actually are back piece so let us refer to it as pin and tail piece. We are going to put our pin piece up to our fingers like this and again, here is our tail piece mounted in the jig. And I got a really sharp pencil, now on the other side. I am going to trace the pencil line, okay, look at that! Almost there, it is almost I got done this before.
Okay, so I let it up really slow. The idea is, we want to get it so that the bit is sort of cutting that line in half. Now with the bit height set, pencil line is not really going to help us anymore at this point. I am going to take the masking tape. I just want enough to cover where that bit it going to bottom out. So now we got support on the front and on the back of the board plus we have our little scribe line. So, there is really not a whole line else we can do to ensure that we are not going to get tear out. If we still get tear out, then that tear out deserves to be there. I do not know if that will work for your customers.
Now, before we start, I just want to show another little tip, I always wax the base of my router and get that guide bushing, I still wax up here. You cans use whatever wax you want to really. I am using renaissance wax. It is one of my favorite machine top and work surface waxes. I am also to wax the top of my fingers here. You know, depending on the jig, depending on the size, if you are doing a really wide, you know, blanket chest side piece, you may have more of a concern with this. Look at the spacing on these fingers, okay, the guide bushing is going to ride in here then jump to this spot then jump to that spot then here and so on.
What you want to make sure to avoid is if the spacing were just a little bit different, the space between here may actually be big enough to fit that guide bushing and that you could really screw up the joints all together so just be aware of that. They actually have way, you know, little things that you can insert in between here to block you from going in there. But as long as you aware of it usually, that is enough to stop you from making that mistake.
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