dado jig.

So - umm - I tried organizing my outdoor gear. A while ago. So I got a couple big bins and a couple medium bins and a couple small bins. And I threw everything in them. Ugh. Still took me hours it seemed to pack for a simple overnight. And I go on overnight trips to the mountains... kind of a lot (I'm up to fifteen nights in a tent so far this year... halfway to my one month in a tent goal... ).

But to start I brought everything in from the garage to the basement. And it ended up - uhh - looking something like this -

Sooooo... I decided I should build something proper. Out of plywood (even though plywood is sort of stupid expensive anymore if you actually want anything decent). Ended up costing about $100. And my design turned out something like this -

So starting with the plywood then -

The key to this whole cubby-slash-shelf thing working is the joinery... all the joints are dados (which I've never done before). They can sort of be done on a table saw with a special dado blade but - well - not very easily (or should I say 'safely' since the guard has to be removed) and definitely not for this kind of project where the joints fall in the middle of say a six-foot-long sheet of plywood.

A router it is then...

But in order to dado properly with a router I really needed a jig. So I hopped over to the interwebs and found a couple different ones. I liked one in particular that used a pattern router bit - and thus did not require an extra piece of wood to be used as a router fence (so the jig was simpler to build - and pattern bits really aren't much more expensive than regular router bits).

Off then I went this evening to make the jig... I used a piece of 1x3 oak for the square ends and clear pine (a 1x4 and 1x6) for the cross sections. Then some jig parts I picked up at the local Rockler (where I ended up in a long chat with the old guy about photography... ). By far the toughest part was making absolutely one hundred percent or more like one hundred ten percent that the fixed part of the jig was square -

Then I clamped everything down super-duper-über tight and drilled the four screws (I even took the time to countersink the holes cos the router will need to glide over the jig and not catch on the screw heads) -

Once the fixed section was in place it was time to route out the slots for the screws - once again everything was totally clamped down while I routed out the 1/4" slots -

Then had to drill in the oak for the screws - set in place with some T-nuts (which I countersunk using a 3/4" spade bit) -

Screwed in the bolts and slid the adjustable part of the jig into place -

Then attached the knobs -

And it was done -

The key again is the pattern bit -

(Note how the bit is below a spinning collar - which follows a pattern - hence the name - or in the case of this jig the edges of the jig)

So the way the jig works is I will use a scrap piece of the plywood to set the width of the jig - clamp the knobs down tight - and route a 1/4" deep slot where all the joints will be. And the reason a jig is needed in the first place - instead of just getting a bit the thickness of the plywood - is because plywood is notoriously inconsistent in thickness (yeah - Rockler makes off-width bits but with this jig I'll be able to get a one hundred percent perfectly fit joint).

Yep.

Now to cross-cut all the 23" wide sheets of plywood to the sizes I need and then start dadoing. Lots. And lots. Of dadoing.