A quick way to set up a dado blade with no measuring! All it takes is a flat surface and your fingers. Most folks don’t realize that your finger tips can detected differences down to thousandths of an inch!
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13 Responses to “Setting Up a Dado Blade”
Great tip Marc, gave me one those ‘why didn’t I think of that’ moments. Always enjoy the intro music too!
Duh, why didn’t I think of that? Thanks for the great tip. This looks much easier than making test cut after test cut and will save me a lot of time and hassle in the future.
Great Tip! Now all I need to do is get a Dado Stack to try it with :)
“Thus Spake Zarathustra” is so fitting for that video clip. This isn’t Monkey Business. Nice tip too.
Another thing you can try is that, when you get close, use a feeler gauge (with your fingertip) to determine how far you’re off. Then use that to pick the correct shim thickness. ‘might be a little faster.
Great tip Marc. I agree, “why didn’t any of us think of that”. This tip will save me a ton of time the next time around.
Only comment I have is I try not to lay my sawblades down on a metal surface. Too easy to damage the sharp points. Other than that, good tip.
Blair
Great tip Marc! Only question is where to get the shims like that? My freud 8″ set didn’t come with such precision shims. Thank for the tip.
They just came with my blade. You should still be able to dial in with the Freud shims, even if they aren’t that precise. I hear some folks used playing cards as shims! lol
The question I have is: The carbide teeth don’t touch each other but the bottom one in the stack sits on the table with all the teeth touching the surface. Don’t the teeth setting “proud” of the blade cause the measure to be off?
The teeth sitting proud is exactly what makes the measurement accurate. We are looking for a true tooth to tooth measurement. So being able to reference the carbide teeth off the same surface as the wood works out quite nicely.
Mark very simple yet very effective tip.
We all know plywood is not even close to accurate thickness anymore. So thickness can vary from 1/32 to 1/64.
What I do since I use my dado set quite a bit, is that I try to have a cut off piece from every set up I do with the stack dado. Then I just write down on that small cut off what chippers and shims I used to make that width of cut. So the next time I need that size dado, grab that cut off that matches that thikness of wood I am using, then set the dado up accordingly.
Then make a test cut, see if the cut off is a snug fit and away I go…
What a time saver Marc. Thanks!