Day Five: Touch-up Cuts: The Dedo Stack (Aiden)

    I spent today doing final cuts and touch-ups on my wood, getting it ready to be glued and turned into a bedside table. I spent the first half of the day cutting eighths, sixteenths, or even thirty-seconds of an inch off of my wood to get it to the perfect size. Right before lunch, I realized that the peice of wood that was to be the base of my bedside table wasn't flat, so Mr. Grisbee helped me put it on a sled that would allow us to move it through the plainer in order to make it flat. While we were able to make the wood flat, running the wood against it's grain through the plainer made the shavings come off in long slivers, which we would soon realized clogged nearly everything we used to clean them up.

    After lunch I needed to make some dados in my wood, which are small cuts in the wood that normally would act as good bottom joints in a box or shelf, but which I wanted to use to make the top slightly more stable and have a better looking side profile. For this, we set up a dado stack saw blade, which is a series of two full saw blades, three spacer blades with only two teeth, and even smaller disk-shaped spacers. These would allow you to add and subtract what you wanted until you got a saw-blade that was the thickness you wanted. I set this up and after cleaning out some more wooden slivers from earlier from the vacuum, I got to work making my dados. This part took me almost the entire afternoon, and by the end of the day I had multiple pieces that fit together almost perfectly.

Me cutting a dado using the dado stack