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Consistent Dado Joints with Inconsistent Material
Question
Forum Responses
From contributor M: There are a couple of ways to go. The best is of course to write your programs after you know the thickness of the material you are going to use. It is a bit of a pain to monitor thickness, but if you can establish a routine, you get used to it. I use Alphacam with constraints. I am pretty sure Microvellum has some sort of parametric you can use to control dado width. Usually if you stick with one manufacturer of melamine, you have no huge problem, as the variance is rarely more than a hundredth or so anyway. Another way is to machine the tenon face as well as the tenon itself to, say, .7 or so. You need to work from the spoilboard up for this. In other words, expose the core on one side of the tenon to a constant thickness and let the bottom of the dado take the inaccuracy. Say you use .75 as a nominal thickness. If the tenon is .25 long, make the dado .28 deep. .72 material will actually make the dado from the surface .25 again. Thicker material will make the dados deeper. If you stop dado both sides of the tennoned part, you also don't have to worry about the tenon bottoming out on one side only. Then again, there is always confirmat.
From contributor B: I agree with contributor F. You have to touch off of your spoilboard, then come up .735 and set that as your part height or material height. Don't touch off the material and set it there. The problem is with your tenon and not the dado. You have to work from the spoilboard up. Not from the material down. From contributor T: Just to add fuel to the question... When he indexes off the spoil board without relocating the dado, won't the top and bottom of the upper be too high or low when assembled? I have/had the same concern and went back to screw construction. Maybe I am missing some of the advantages. I also don't like the double process for the t&b of the upper and base deck (tenon first, then flip or change to the saw for the groove). Looking forward to more input! 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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