Bad Joints - no, not the smoking kind

I started having trouble with loose finger joints in my beehive boxes. My finger joint jig just wasn’t doing what it did when it was new. I now have a couple good size stacks of “seconds” :(.

In trying to figure out what was wrong I went through several scenarios. First, the front box felt a little loose and on closer inspection I found the holes in the aluminum sled spacer were worn. I replaced it with a new steel one.

That helped, but not much. I now have another stack of “seconds” :(.

things still felt a little loose so I replaced one of the wood runners with steel. That tightened things up considerably.

But I still had problems. There was virtually no play in the system but the joints were still loose. Fortunately, this time I learned my lesson and only did a single run of boards instead of a whole batch. And still no good. I decided to measure the pins and spaces to try and get a clue as to what was going on.

As you can see, these are not the measurements I wanted. But this gave me a clue. If the spaces were too big, that means the dado blade is too wide. But how? It’s the same setup I’ve always used. So I looked at the blades:

Shown here is the inside of one of the outer blades caked with pine pitch and sawdust. The other one was actually worse, but I didn’t think to take the pictures until after I had cleaned it.

I cleaned all the blades, put everything back together and tried again.

This is better:

Much better!!

-- Michael R. Harvey - Brewster, NY - RusticElementArt.com - SpaceAware.org - AnConn.com