This video is about making finger joints
like this one here.
I used that finger joint for the bottom corners of this
cabinet. I'll have the flat panel here.
And that's joining up with a 2 by 6 that runs
horizontal. And I wanted this connection to be
really rigid so to give this cabinet some stiffness.
So I made this tight finger joint to stiffen it all up.
I would normally use my handy Screw Advance Box
Joint Jig to make that kind of joint, but the side
panels for this cabinet were a little bit too wide
for this jig so I had to think of another method of doing it.
I could have made the box joint on my
Slot Mortising Machine because with this crank and the
fence cover, I can very precisely control the vertical
position. But I would had to somehow
figure out how to mount the panel on here, like that,
and that was just a bit too awkward.
Or maybe the real reason was that I was looking
for another excuse to find another use for my
new Pantorouter.
To make the finger joint on my Pantorouter
I had to make a template.
I started making the template by marking
1 and a half inch intervals along a piece of plywood.
I then made marks where I had measured the
1 and a half inch intervals, which I then used
as a guide when I was gluing down the blocks to
guide my ball bearing on the Pantorouter.
But the resulting template was not as accurate
as I'd been hoping. I'd introduced too
much error with all the steps that I'd taken to get
my blocks in place.
So what I ended up doing is, I ended up trimming
all the blocks to get them exactly on.
I attached a ruler to the back of my template
and aligned that always with the slot on my sled.
And that way there's only 1 alignment that I had to get
just right to get the blocks all exactly in position.
After trimming, my blocks were consistent to within
a few thou of each other.
So I now had a template for making some very accurate
joints on the Pantorouter.
So my finger joint template here is actually
half a meter wide.
Or about 20 inches.
And the bearing will actually reach all the way from
either end to the other end of this,
which gives me a range of motion with the router bit
of 25 centimeters or about 10 inches.
So I can handle some pretty wide stock in here.
And if I need to handle wider stock I just have to
move it side to side and then do another set of cuts.
The tricky part with this template is that my
slots in here are a little bit wider than the bearing here.
And I don't want to have any play in here
so I always have to operate on this thing
with the bearing against the left edge.
Now to help me do that, I've taken one of the
springs down here, this one here,
which is responsible for lifting this side,
and I've disconnected it so that there's only the spring
that's pulling the other part here and that naturally
gives the router a tendency to want to stick to
that side here. So that'll help me make sure that all
of my cuts have no slop in them and with a half inch
bit, I'll get half inch slots.
I put the other corners of the cabinet together with
simple dowel joints. And I have another video
explaining how I went through that.