Biscuit Joiner: Create an Offset

Biscuit joinery is one of the quickest, simplest ways to join two boards together. When joining to boards using a biscuit joiner, a single fence setting will produce a joint that sets two surfaces flush to one another. Many times that is the desired result, but sometimes you want to create a slight reveal, such as in a table leg to apron joint. For situations like that, how can you set up the joiner to produce an offset so that there is a consistent reveal produced across multiple joints?

Your first thought might be to adjust the fence to move the biscuit slot on one of the pieces by the size of your reveal. That approach would work, but poses two challenges: 1) small adjustments on a biscuit joiner fence can be tedious, requiring painstaking measurement, and a few trial cuts on scrap to get your setup dialed in, and 2) It can be challenging to set the fence to the same distance every time, so repeatability will suffer. What’s the solution?

Use a something instead of a ruler. Rather than measuring and adjusting your biscuit joiner fence, find a flat object such as the piece that George uses here, and use that to create the offset. Setup is so simple with this approach, and repeatability is virtually guaranteed.

Test. As with any joinery process, test on a piece of scrap to ensure that you are going to get the results that you expect. It’s easy to fix after a scrap cut, but it will slow you down if you need to make an adjustment after you’ve cut a biscuit slot in your actual work piece.

After you’ve mastered this technique, check out other videos on woodworking joinery techniques that you can add to your skill set.