This is probably second nature to many of you, but it was my first attempt at cross grain dados. These are dados in the sides of a drawer to accept spacers. It’s a long drawer and I wanted a few options so things wouldn’t just slide to the back of the drawer.
Normally I would first saw the two sides and then chisel or router plane it clean. In this case, there was a stop required at the groove for the drawer bottom and I didn’t want to risk sawing through it.
Any shortcuts or suggestions are always welcome.
First up was to scribe the dado sides using a knife and square. I knifed one side, and then used my 1/4” chisel and marked the width for the other side then scribed that as well. I went fairly deep with the cut.
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Next I cut small notches at both ends to try to avoid any blow out with the chisel (or later the router plane).
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I then used the chisel to make multiple cuts down the length of the dado and cleaned it out.
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I actually knifed the walls a second time and repeated the chisel cuts and clean out a second time to establish a bit of a deeper wall. I found after the first one, that edge chipping was almost guaranteed unless I took the time to get the walls a bit deeper than the first chisel cut.
Once the second chisel out was complete, I set up my router plane with the 1/4” blade. I also set up a stop for the router plane, so I wouldn’t accidentally blow out the groove from the drawer bottom panel.
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To be continued....
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