Finger Joints for the Dummy Woodworker (2-by-4 Week 7)

Box joint, sometimes called a finger joint

Well, the last day of 2-by-4 Week is here. We still had more than twenty DotD candidates to choose from, so we picked one at random, and boy! did we pick a winner! well, more of a loser: this particular idiot turned out to be stupid enough that she didn't need a content editor to mess up her post. She'd have qualified even if the lumber dimensions hadn't been hosed. Meet Alexis Rohlin and feast your eyes on her eHow.com post, "How to Make Finger Joints in Woodworking"¹ (now at OurPastimes.com). Thank the lord for that "in Woodworking," or Alexis might have tried to explain orthopedic surgery...

The bit of Rohlin's post that caught the eye of an Antisocial Network staffer is,

"Cut a 30-inch long board out of the 2-foot-by-6-foot board. The rest of the 2-foot-by-6- foot board is going to be used as the miter saw gauge extension. Measure 13-inches on the 2-foot-by-6-foot board and mark it with a pencil."

We have no idea what Alexis is walking about here -- her "things you'll need" list calls for a "3/4-inch thick 2-foot-by-6-foot board," which we suppose could be some sort of plywood... but it's not. In reality, Rohlin managed to combine one source's instructions for making a sled jig for use on a table saw (our staff carpenter has one he uses on a router) with a second post's instructions for using the miter gauge. Either way, a "2-foot-by-6-foot board" is gonna be kinda unwieldy... and even at only 13 inches long, it'd weigh maybe 500 pounds... Worse, Alexis encountered the term "miter gauge" in her research, and -- for unknown reasons -- assumed that meant the author was talking about miter saws. That's apparently how she came up with the instructions

• Place the dado blade on the miter saw
• Place the miter gauge extension board onto the miter saw table

Once we saw that rubbish, we knew Rohlin hadn't ever seen a miter saw, a table saw, a miter gauge, or a dado blade; and maybe never a finger joint. The instructions – in both of her references – are for a table saw! Mounting a dado blade in a miter saw not only makes no sense, it would be dangerous as hell! All that was left was for us to look at the moronic "warnings" our Dumbass of the Day provided for her readers:

"Take care when running a saw so that you do not cut yourself or harm others"

Note: these are the instructions for a box joint, which is sometimes called a finger joint – it has nothing to do with finger joints in molding

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_7707778_make-finger-joints-woodworking.html

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