Dado Cuts for Dummy Woodworkers

Cutting a dado on a table saw

Back in the bad old days, just about anyone could contribute the fruits of his (or her) "expertise" to eHow.com and collect anywhere from three to fifteen bucks for all the hard work. There's little doubt now that the principals at eHow were more concerned with advertising  revenue than with accuracy, especially in those early days. That's why whenever you run across content penned by "eHow Contributor" on the site, there's a strong possibility it's... well, wrong. Wrong, like "How to Make a Dado Cut with a Table Saw."¹

The anonymous author first introduces dado blades though, unlike most eHowians, assumes that someone asking how to make a dado cut already knows what a dado is (this post must have been written before eHow instituted minimum word counts...). The ensuing instructions are reasonably accurate, though incomplete: there's nothing about the so-called "wobble blade" after one mention in the introduction. But Anonymous makes it very obvious he has no knowledge of table saws by what he says for his sixth step:

"Move your workpiece back and forth along the blade until the cut is the width you need."

No one who has ever actually used a table saw would tell you to move a workpiece "back and forth" on a table saw blade! We aren't even sure what the anonymous contributor's instruction is intended to mean: move it from side to side? Push-pull? What? And then there's the "tip":

"Expect to spend some time trying to find the precise combination of blade, chippers and fence alignment to produce the width of cut you want." Ummm, dumbass, there's only one fence alignment on a table saw, and it has nothing to do with the width of a dado cut  -- unless, that is, the cut is wide enough to require multiple passes, but anonymous never addresses the need to change fence position. More dumbassery appears in the "Warning": "Do not get in the habit of being careless with a dado blade due to the fact that it is sunken."

A dado blade is "sunken"? WTF? No, anonymous, you started out (fairly) well, but the evidence for your lack of knowledge just snowballed. You should've quit while you were ahead. In other words, before you started. You didn't, though, so that makes you the Antisocial Network's Dumbass of the Day.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_2090684_make-dado-cut-table-saw.html

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