Sometimes it feels like the only joinery I cut is dovetails.  A distant second to dovetails are dadoes (a/k/a housing joints).  And the mortises and tenons I cut for the ash sitting bench felt like the first I’d done since building my workbench, and the first for furniture in years.  I

n my view, dadoes are the easiest (and most satsifying) joint to get right.  You can even cut the dado overly-tight and later fix the mating piece to fit.  The thunk of a fully-seated housing joint is a beautiful thing.  And it can be a very strong joint, in the presence of glue or nails (or both).  

An overly-tight joint works quite well in compressible pine.

Whenever possible, though, I will use a stopped dadoes for the show face of a piece.  A through-dado is just fine if it won’t be seen (either on the back of the carcase or covered by a face frame) or the piece isn’t fine furniture.  But on the show face, a through-dado looks too much like a mortise haunch to me.  No matter how perfect it is, I’d rather have the clean shoulder line.

Isn’t a dado pretty much a shallow mortise with a shoulderless tenon, anyway?

The trickiest part, I find, is the act of fitting the mating piece into the final joint.  Boards can cup between dimensioning and assembly.  Driving a cupped board into a straight dado is a recipe for brusingt the surrounding face grain.  To combat this, I clamp on a caul to flatten the mating piece.  After it’s seated, the dado itself will hold the board flat.

Dovetails typically do this work without need for a caul.

On an unrelated note, I’m deciding on whether to paint the wall cabinet before I glue it together.  I wouldn’t normally, but I’m using latex (not milk) paint for this one.  So working out the kinks on the underside of the bottom board before assembly is probably a good idea.

Probably.

JPG