Tongue and Groove Joinery With A Router Table or a Table Saw - Vanity/Desk/Dartboard Cabinet - 291

in the last video we covered mortise and tenon joinery in this video we are covering tongue and groove joinery for frame and panel construction this is cabinet CE and a dry assembly we have all of our cabinets all four of them in a dry assembly - the Center style on the lower cabinet sides and I held off on this because this is going to be in a tongue and groove system there's going to be a groove all the way around here as well as on both sides of the center style and then a tongue top and bottom that will fit into the other grooves here and then of course panels inside the rest of it so I held off on cutting this because I need the groove established in order for me to establish the final length of this piece and as well as to size the the tongue so how do we cut the groove there's several different ways but there's two methods that initially come into my mind and that is if we were to just clamp these two pieces together making sure the front face remains flat then we can put a slot cutting bit into a router table and run this over the router table so that the bearing reference is on this inside face and we can cut a quarter inch wide groove all the way around we can do the exact same thing with just a regular handheld router if we clamp everything and make sure that this face remains flush all the way around and just approach it from that method and that's what I was going to do however the bearing that I have on this slot cutting router bit will result in a 3/8 of an inch deep groove and that's just a little bit deeper than what I want I want a quarter inch wide and quarter inch deep groove so we're gonna pass on this and instead we're gonna take each piece over to the router table individually and use a spiral up cut bit to make a quarter inch wide slot that is one quarter of an inch deep here at the router table I have a quarter inch spiral up cut router bit installed and I have it positioned so that it is exactly one quarter of an inch away from the fence and I'm using a drill bit to confirm this now I also have the height set at 1/4 of an inch and what that does is it establishes a groove that is 1/4 of an inch away from the fence and 1/4 of an inch wide and 1/4 of an inch deep I just a tiny bit more than 1/4 of an inch deep now I also have these removable fences positioned in such a way that these two reference lines here represent the start and stop point of the router bit so if I do need to make plunges plunge cuts I know that the router bit starts cutting exactly right here at this line same with the exit if I put this over here and line it up with the back side of the router bit you can see that it exits right there that's useful if I need to start somewhere over here and plunge down I won't be able to visually see the router bit but I can visually see where it is cutting due to these reference lines up here and a couple of these cuts will be plunge cuts now for all of our pieces we labeled them so that in this case this board is c---seventeen belongs to cabinet C it is 17 inches in length and we wrote all of the notations here on the exterior face and that's important because due to the fact that our rails and styles are not the exact same thickness as the legs in order for this groove to line up we need to have one reference plane that is consistent on all of our pieces and that is the outside face the outside face of the rails and styles will line up with the outside face of the legs if that is also the case then we need to put the outside face up against the fence at all times now for these cuts as you can see I'll be cutting into the tenon and I don't want to do that I want to leave as much tenon material as I possibly can because that's just more surface area from glue technically speaking you can cut through all of this tenon but like I said I want to leave as much as possible for glue so I'm going to plunge right at the beginning of this tenon right here and then complete my cut and on the exit side I'll do the exact opposite I'll make sure that the router bit comes through into the tenon completely and then I can lift the piece off therefore leading is much tenon as possible [Music] [Music] we have all the grooves cut for the panels and this is a dry assembly of cabinet D I made sure to put this together so that everything is nice and square and the tops are nice and flush now this is the right side of cabinet D and it gets a center style like so that means we need to cut a tongue on the end of this board that has the grooves already cut in it now when I cut the grooves I try to make sure that this was perfectly centered but I did it in one pass with the router bit so if I'm a little bit off the way just Center it is to flip the board around and make another pass but that will widen the groove because I wanted to stay with one quarter of an inch I just eyeballed Center and I didn't do a tremendously awesome job because I can see that I'm visually a little bit larger on this side then this side that just means we're gonna have two different setups to cut this side of the tongue and to cut this right side of the tongue that will determine the thickness of the tongue and now I need to determine the length of the tongue now whatever I do on one side I need to do on the other side so the easiest way to do that is to simply push this up against the inside face up there on the front and measure this overhang right here whatever this distance is I'll divide that by two and set that as my distance from the left side of the blade to the fence and that will remove half of that distance on each end which should result in a perfect fit the distance from the top of the rail to the bottom of the style is dead-on at a half of an inch so I'm still accurate to my Sketchup model so I'll set the fence to remove one quarter of an inch because my dado stack is set wider than the amount of material that I want to remove it's much easier to add a sacrificial fence rather than to take a bunch of the pieces off so for this case I have a sacrificial fence clamped to my table saw fence and then I positioned it to what I think is the appropriate width of cut I've also raised the blade tithe to what I think is the appropriate depth and I ran a test piece now this test piece I can use to determine both of the width and depth and in my case the width is spot-on I really like this right at one quarter of an inch and I also have the depth of cut right here so if I spin this around and if I use the piece we're going to cut as a reference right there I know I want to remove material from this bottom side so if I put that material into the depth of cut and if this surface and then the top side of this face in here are aligned then I know my depth of cut is absolutely perfect for this side of the tongue with everything dialed in for the first half of the tongue I'll go ahead and cut both ends of the board and after moving the fence twice we've arrived at the perfect fit so now that this is dialed in I'm going to go ahead and make these cuts on all of my style pieces and then we'll repeat the process for the top part of the tongue the only difference for the other side is I need to remove just a tiny bit more material so I'm going to raise the blade by just a little bit make a test cut and make sure everything is they at the appropriate depth before I cut all of my pieces the final thing to check is to make sure that the tongue is not too long we cut our boards to the final length before the joinery so this tongue might be a little bit too long and may bottom out in the groove so with another board already cut we can do a little assembly here and see that there's a tiny tiny gap at the bottom of the tongue that means there's enough room for glue squeeze-out all of our faces are nice and flush so this board is indeed not too long the doors for the upper cabinets are next and they're gonna be made with just regular tongue and groove joinery at all at the table saw now the reason I didn't use the table saw for all of the tongue and groove joinery down at the bottom is because I didn't want the table saw blade to go all the way through the bottom of the leg which it would have to do that means I would have to patch a small piece of groove right here that is going to be exposed in the bottom of the legs where there is no joinery it's not the end of the world if you do have to patch something like that you can do it and you can probably get a good color match if you pull from the same stock but I didn't want to have that patch at all so to eliminate that we used the router table but like I said every bit of the doors is gonna be made at the table saw tongue and groove join around the table saw is incredibly easy to do and I have a video on my website showing you step-by-step how to make tongue and groove doors on my table saw with a regular table saw blade the only disadvantage of using a regular table saw blade is you won't get a flat bottom groove because the vast majority of them have alternating angled teeth now if you have a table saw blade that has flat grind teeth then that'll work just fine well that will result in a flat bottom groove this one will work just fine as well but what I've done is I've taken my dado stack and I've reduced it down to just the outside blades and that will result in a quarter inch wide flat bottom groove now just because it's quarter of an inch and I'm working with 3/4 inch stock doesn't mean all I have to do is just try and line it up with senators one more thing you have to do first line the blade up as centered as possible onto the material and then once you pass you a material through flip it end for end regardless of how much material the second pass will take and make another pass that means if I am 1/64 of an inch away from being perfectly centered that 1/64 of an inch will be removed on the second pass and the resulting groove will be absolutely perfect and center all of the door joinery is complete and the doors turned out really well we're pleased with the way that these doors look and of course all of the base joinery is complete so now we need to put something in all of these grooves we're going to focus our attention on all of the panels and we should be able to get every single one of our panels out of one eighth quarter board this is the board that we're going to use to get all of our panels out of and it's kind of hard to show an entire board in one shot so basically this is an eighth quarter board it's got some curls some some beautiful figure in it we won't know for sure how much until we really dig into it but the bottom side in this orientation the bottom side is a little bit more flat sawn a little bit more Cathedral look to it and the top side has a little bit more straight grain appearance to the grain now that means we're not going to get a perfect match along its entire width for a single panel luckily we have a lot of situations where we can play off of symmetry so whatever we have in the right door up on top we can flip and put in the other door and kind of get a symmetrical pattern even though individually they may not look symmetrical throughout the entire width of an individual panel and then also on the bottom on the bottom cabinet on the sides we have a center style that's going to divide those two panels so even if it's just kind of out there as far as the grain goes individually we we can still book match and have two symmetrical panels somewhat symmetrical anyway and speaking of book matching this is a full two inches thick and all of our panels only need to be one quarter of an inch thick so what we're going to do is cut this into several different lengths based upon the total length of our panels and then we can joint two faces at the joint or a.y face and a short face and then at that point we will be ready to go at the bandsaw to resaw a bunch of the panels I have my bandsaw set up with my resaw fence and this is just a very simple homemade solution that slips over the stock fence on the saw now the goal here is to get a panel that is just a little bit more than 1/4 of an inch so I set my distance both on top and bottom make sure you check the distance from the blade to the fence on the bottom as well as the top to make sure you have your table angle properly set but I have the distance set to be about 5/16 of an inch so we can resaw all of our pieces and then plane them down to an absolute perfect fit each one of our eight quarter boards yielded five panels and now we can go ahead and mill all of these down to their final thickness at the planer the left and right side of each of the lower cabinets is going to have two book-matched panels and we went ahead and made some diagonal lines on our boards before we sliced out these panels that way we can put them back in sequential order and we can open them up and see book-matched panels so some of these are going to look great some of them aren't that's just because we're going to be cutting through some of the grain this flat side area we're slicing kind of in the grain this quarter sawn area will look more symmetrical so on every one of these this the outside here will be kind of symmetrical it's just the inside that's going to vary because we are slicing through the grain so we want to take the time here and open up each one of these pairs and see which ones are acceptable and which ones are not acceptable because all we need is for book-matched pairs now this that's somewhat symmetrical on this line on this piece of grain here but then we have this extra one that's all by itself on the left side so something like this I would probably say no go back to this first one here and I would probably be more inclined to say yes we're gonna go through all our pieces all of our panels and make sure we have at least four that are nice in the book matched orientation we've determined the appropriate placement for every single one of our panels and really take the extra time here to you know do a once around twice around just really look at all of the panels and make sure that you have the appropriate orientation for every single one of them so now that we have everything in place we know we're not short on any panels we know everything should should look appropriate when it's all said and done we were left over with we've got five panels left over which is good because this is going to be some material that we can pull from for the drawer bottoms now I understand that not all boards are created equally and you may not have the same amount of yield you may not even have the same size boards as we have but keep on to keep a hold of all of your extra material because odds are you may end up using it down the road now that the location for all of the panel's is established we can cut them to their final width and to do so we're using the table saw we're going to start with the upper cabinet doors because they are the most narrow and width and work our way around the upper cabinets then we can go to the lower cabinets you [Music] that's it for the third video in this series if you enjoyed it give it a thumbs up and subscribe so you don't miss the next one which will be picking up with the arches on the lower cabinets there's gonna be a lot to cover in the next one but be sure to subscribe so you don't miss it check out my website Jay's custom creations calm and while you're there sign up for my email newsletter so you don't miss any of the stuff that I published publish a lot more stuff on my website than I do right here on YouTube and another big shout out to Shawn stone of stone and Sons dotnet check out his website he's the one who's building alongside me in this entire project and he also purchased all this cherry that we're just having a lot of fun cutting up so until next time you guys take care and I'll you know you know see you I'll see you later yeah burn it oh so good until the end