Using a Biscuit Joiner

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Kevin and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to show you a little bit about the biscuit joiner operation. A really good place to use the biscuit joiner is on the table saw because the table saw has a nice steel surface that is machined very flat with the fence that is perpendicular to it so it?s a really good place to get good, accurate registration. We've got a couple test pieces here. The way you use a biscuit joiner is you're connecting two pieces. We're going to connect these perpendicular to one another because we're going to have a box that's going to be connected like that on all sides. So what you're going to want to do is you'll put the two pieces the way you want them connected and so you get them lined up and then you make a mark on each board that corresponds to one another. As you can see here, we've got the pencil mark that is lining up to one another. You don't have to worry about being super dead on, as long as they're very close, the biscuit joiner has a little bit of, the slot that it cuts is bigger than the actual biscuits so you've got adjustment side to side, so you don't have to worry about being super accurate on this as you do with other joinery which makes it a good economical alternative. You just kind of go make a bunch of quick marks and then cut the joints. Once you've made your mark, what you're going to do is you're going to cut the first one here where the actual board is going into the other board. You can cut that joint first. Then on the second one, what you're going to do is, or what I like to do is put on a little piece of 150 grit sandpaper below the joiner so that when you joint it, the jointer's slightly raised and so when you go to put these together, this board is just ever so slightly proud of this board. When you can come after later after the glue up, you can just wrap that flush to this surface with the router and a flush trim bit and get a nice, perfectly even plane between these two boards because with the biscuit joiner having a little bit of room to slide in there, you don't want this board proud of this one, that's a much bigger problem. But if you can get this board just slightly proud of that one with the little sandpaper trick, it makes it a lot easier for really good accurate results. Ok, we've got the biscuit in this slot here. We take the other board and we put it on, a little drive through here and I don't even know if you can pick up, but this board is just ever so slightly proud of that board and we can easily take care of that with the router and a flush trim bit and get really good results because like I said, the other way, if this board were to come out proud of this one, it can make for a situation where it can just make for a real uneven joint and it?s a lot harder to deal with that than it is with this. This is going to make for really good accurate results and is a good little trick to employ when you're using biscuits to do perpendicular joints like this."