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Blind Dadoes Versus Dowel Joinery
Question
Forum Responses
All that said, dowels can be very efficient as well, but you will need some very expensive equipment to make it work well, namely a dowel boring and insertion machine and a case clamp. At the different shops I have visited I have noticed a few commonalities at different levels. Small CNC shops doing less than 30 cabinets per day use the staple screw method like True 32. Shops in the 30-60 cabinet per day range are using blind dado or confirmat construction (not both). Larger shops making 100+ cabinets per day are using dowel construction. Keep in mind this is only based on my personal observation and by no means is a statistical study. These would all be euro style construction using CNC router and or beam saw/ptp for panel processing.
From contributor M: The short answer to your question is that you can gain time in the assembly process using confirmats instead of gluing and stapling. There are other benefits as well. As far as time to drill while the sheet is nesting, it all depends. How many parts are on the sheet being nested, how fast is your nest, how many parts will have to be drilled? If you have a sheet full of stretchers and nailers, your operator will have to remove the sheet, load, sort, and then drill. This may be a lot to do before the next sheet is finished. I just have the operator sort and let someone else do the drilling. I would be interested to see if that works for you. Contributor R, that is a good observation that you make. I would say that this industry is slow to change, and that may be why you haven't seen more confirmats. The beauty of this system is that it bridges the gap and is a good choice for small and large volumes alike. And you don't have to invest in case clamps. Dowels and case clamps work well when you have many boxes the same size and you can put several boxes in the same load... and even better, have two clamps with very little down time. Clamps are difficult for the low volume shop to justify because they are doing so many different sizes and tying the machine up for 1 or 2 boxes. With confirmats, you have the alignment advantages of dowels and the speed of screws, and you don't have to monkey with a case clamp. If assembly becomes the bottleneck, you put drivers in more hands. With a clamp, it is only as fast as the operator and the glue.
From contributor R: If he was using blind dado and staple/glue only it seems that would be the fastest way to go because there would be no secondary operation to do. The operator could be edgebanding rather than boring horizontal holes. From the original questioner: Thanks for all of the feedback guys! I didn't mention in my first post that the majority of our work is commercial and the specs call for an AWI standard which requires dowels and/or confirmats. Our residential work on plywood boxes presently gets stapled and screwed (#8x2"), but we still machine for blind dado for ease of position and location. From contributor M: Stop dados are permitted in Premium grade, as are dowels, European assembly screws, and fully concealed interlocking mechanical systems. There are other requirements for this grade. Please refer to (400A-T-12). Contributor R, the consensus is "secondary operation = bad." It is a tradeoff. Those that do butt joints and staples consider blind dados a secondary operation... not essential and a non-value added step. But you do have alignment advantages with dados, so there is a payoff. The same is true with confirmats. You have even more accurate alignment with these guys, not just vertical, but positionally as well (front to back). With stopped dados that are machined on a flat table, you must make the dado long enough to accept the tenon. Unless you radius the tenon to fit the slot (talk about additional operations). You don't have this as much with confirmats. They are as perfect as your machining. I recently showed my guys how flipping the stock before they cut it was costing us serious time. It would take them 5 seconds to flip a piece. Not too bad, but we had 5,000 parts to cut, and it would cost us almost 7 hours. If I had the option of finishing the job in 21 hours or 28... I hope you see what I mean. This may not be so dramatic with 30 cabinets a day, but then again, it all adds up. I would much rather be paying a guy to build much needed cabinets for the shop than flipping stock. I need to do a time study on stopped dados vs confirmats. What am I saying? I can't even get cabinets for the shop! Would you like to add information to this article? Interested in writing or submitting an article? Have a question about this article? Have you reviewed the related Knowledge Base areas below? 
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