Using Fence Support on Thin Material
George VondriskaDescription
When you’re using tools like a biscuit joiner, Festool Domino or dowel machine, they all have a commonality. They each have a fence that registers the tool on your work. We rely on the fence not only for registration, but also to keep the machine at the correct angle relative to the work. This becomes problematic when the surface you’re referencing the joinery machine on is narrow. And this is a very common scenario. If you’re assembling two pieces in an L shape, one of those cuts will rely on the fence resting on a thin edge.
The fix is in
The good news is that the solution for this is simple, and relies and stuff you probably have plenty of in your shop; scrap wood. Since the material the fence is resting on is too narrow, let’s make it wider. Do this by simply clamping a piece of scrap on to the board, building up with width of the edge. Now the fence on your joinery machine has plenty of surface area to rest on, the joint will be easier to cut and, even more importantly, the slot or dowel hole you cut will be at the perfect angle relative to the face of the board.
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When you're using a joinery machine and this could be something like a biscuit joiner or a Domino, Festool Domino or a dowel joinery machine, they all work the same way. Which is they've got a fence that needs to rest on a surface. Now there are areas where this can get a little bit problematic. So for instance, in this case, these two pieces of plywood are fixing to go together like this to create an L. And this is a great application for a loose tenon, biscuit, Domino, or dowel. And it'll add strength, it'll register the surfaces. This one's easy peasy because there's a big surface here and we can set the fence on there, register it, easy to do. Where I've seen people run into problems is when we go to do this piece and we bring the joinery machine here, it's so easy to rock this. And if this rocks a little bit the very thing that we're trying to gain we're gonna lose. One of the things we want is a nice uniform distance from this surface to the slot that we're cutting. And if this happens, we're not gonna get that. So there's a fix you can do for this that's pretty easy and pretty straightforward. And that is simply have a piece of scrap. And the problem is this is narrow, it's thin. So let's make it bigger, let's make it thicker. Take a piece of scrap, make it flush with the top edge, clamp it in place. And I'm just double checking to make sure it really is flush. And what that's gonna do, it's simple, it just gives us more surface area for that fence. Again, whether Domino, biscuit joiner, or dowel machine, it gives us more surface area for that fence to sit on. Now, general use stuff, when I'm using a machine like this what I like to do is get it on the work and then rock it until I feel it go flat. And this is where having that extra piece of meat, that extra piece of wood behind there helps out. So as I roll that forward, if I was still just on a 3/4 inch edge, it'd be easy to over roll it. But now, because I can feel right there, it hits that thick piece. Simple thing to do, but we gain a lot of support and it really simplifies what we need to do in order to make accurate cuts like this.
Festool also has a "Support Bracket - 495666" that mounts to the bottom of the base plate. In this scenario, it would be perpendicular to the board pointing downward from the bottom of the base plate. The added support would be from the front or face of the board and not the top, without the need of a block or clamp. It mounts easily with two thumb screws and is part of the Q Set bundle when buying a new DF500.
I am an inexperienced woodworker. I have used a dowl-it jig but I don't see how I could use it on the non end grain piece like you did in this video with the domino machine. Is there a trick to this that I'm missing or is that type of tool not applicable to this set up. The end grain piece is straight forward. I realize I could biscuit join it, just curious if I could dowel it someway.