Sunday, November 11, 2012

starting working on the rafters for the doghouse

The next step on the doghouse is cutting the lap joints for the rafters.

example lap-joint
Since these joints are located at the end of the boards, we don't have to use a noisy and dusty router for this, instead we can just use the table saw. Which means we will also be done with this a lot faster.

Well in theorie anyway. Since I do not own a 6" Dado blade at this point in time and none of my local stores carries them (they only have 8" dado's and my saw is not powerful enough). Well I'm just sorry out of luck and have to use a little jig and cut them in several steps and ensure that the cut's line up.

out little jig

keeping the fingers save, thanks to all the clamps and the wooden support
apparently I can't raise the saw blade high enough
Now I still encountered a little annoying issue. Basically my rafters are 4" wide and so I need to cut the joint 4" deep, but can only raise the blade 3.75" height... So we had to use the little gent's saw to finish the cut by hand.

And all the 8 joints are finished now, so that we can continue with the dog hosue tomorrow and cut the bird-mouth joints (once I figured out how to calculate the correct positions)