so i bought this harbor freight dovetailjig and reading the reviews on it numerous people had problems setting this thing up and getting a good dovetail. now i spent maybe two hours test cutting things on here and gettingit dialed in and i'll show you exactly how to dial in your dovetail jig so i'm going to loosen up all theseguides and everything like that and i'll show you exactly step-for-step what idid to get this dialed in so i'm going to un-dial it and so it's like it's rightout of the box
just loosen up everything. out of the boxthis was reversed so i unscrewed these flip it around so that you push downlike this to tighten. but before out of the box it had it pushing it this way to tightenone thing i recommend on this is using some teflon spray putting some on yourfinger putting some on these plastic rollershere these will move a lot easier silicone or teflon is very works great and you'll notice a huge difference inthe smoothness of these because before
when i was cranking these down it wasbinding kind of we're going to start with the horizontal block then thevertical block with these make sure your eccentric rod is all the way up tightenit down to you start feeling pressure and then back it off half a turn tighten it down until you feel tension back it off about half a turn. so mountthe vertical piece in there we want to line this comb up about 5/32" from the edge of this. you can line it up 5/32" from the edge ofyour board and tighten down. repeat the same thing on this side
tighten it down as tight as you can getit now you have your comb set at 5/32" from the edge so the next thing you want to do is setthe depth of your bracket frame. so for this 3/4" piece ofpine i found that measuring an 1-1/8" from the back of this comb is thecorrect depth next thing you want to do is just yourstop pin right here and right here right here and right here the way i do this isfirst you put in the vertical piece of wood and clamp it in place so that yourhorizontal piece wood can get lined up correctly
so what you want to do is have the edgeof the wood half way underneath that the finger where it's going to start in sothese fingers are half inch so you want to move your piece of woodover a quarter inch what you have it lined up clamp it down make sure it's up againstyour vertical piece of wood we measure measure twice cut once so after you have your horizontal pieceof wood lined up halfway under a finger move the stop pin all the way up againstthe piece of wood that you just clamp down and have it sitting where you needit and tighten down the stop pin bolt
with a 12mm millimeter wrench now that sets this side of yourhorizontal. so put the 1/2" shim right here put in your top horizontalpiece clamp it down and your vertical piececan get lined up you put in a piece of wood and push downon the comb so that it doesn't move and you can get everything squared away once you got this side lined up andclamp it down and move the stop pin all the way over and from my experience even this is notgoing to line up correctly so move this
stop pin in about a 1/32" pull itout this way about 1/32" of an inch that way your edges because there'sdepending on your router and your your template guide you're going to have some slop in thatso to line everything up found that you need to pull the stop pinfor the vertical piece of wood stock out about the 1/32" of an inch and thentighten down the bolt and you can rinse and repeat on the other side again lineit up a quarter of an inch underneath the finger once you have it lined up aquarter inch in between this tooth stop
pin over and tighten it down and takeyour half and shim put it in between block and the horizontal piece and clampit down you can align your vertical piece. line it up on the right side this time and clamp it down sure that the outside edge is square just like you did on the leftside you push the stop pin up against the piece of wood and pull it out about1/32" of an inch so when you put in your horizontal piece you want to put your vertical piece in just so it can butt up against the edge of the verticalpiece then clamped down your horizontal
pieces but you have them aligned withthe front and then for your vertical piece you want them to hold down on thecomb fence and lifted all the way up and ensure that it is up against the stoppin and also all the way up against the comb do that for you can either do oneat a time you do both at the same time but holding them can be kind of pain andthat is pretty much the complete setup of the dovetail jig from harbor freight so i've got this plunge router fromharbor freight and to do dovetails you need to have a template guide harborfreight does not provide you with the face plate to fit in here which would beeasy to make
if i had a 3d printer for these templateguides so it would sit in there and you would screw this on there so i went out and boughtanother router. i bought the fixed base 2 horsepower router from harbor freight there's on had a 20% coupon. youhave to put in the 1/4" collet in this and on this has these little ridges right here andthese are completely around so i had to sand little recesses on these templateguides for to fit in here harbor freight sells these templateguides and it doesn't fit their own
router so so i had to modify thistemplate guide for the work you think they would sell parts that arecompletely compatible without having to modify anything or a five cent plasticpiece of face plate from molded plastic for the plunge router that i alreadyowned now i've got the template guide seated in there because this shaft onthis is kind of short and this is also a harbor freight dovetail bit a 1/2" inch14 degree dovetail this shank right here is kind of short so you have to be very very careful toensure that you line this thing up correctly the way i do it with thisrouter took me a few tries to get it
right turn this all the way down untilthis collet nut hits this brass fitting right here zero out this gauge right here to this markhere here's the zero mark and i turn it uptwo notches to get the collet nut off of the brassfitting so i take my little ruler with thesquare on it and set it at about 19/32" the instruction says to use 23/32" but i tried that already and it creates too tight of a joint and do itand it's not usable so the way i do this
is set up your ruler or your gauge to19/32" tighten it down a little bit until its snug pullit out a little ways and then tighten this down verify the depth spin it around make sure nothing'sgrinding on it so you have it in the ballpark where you need it on theoutside edges i'm going to label these one and one then two and two so that you know which sideis which so you don't get them mixed up
you can remove the pieces and hopefully theywill line up correctly ok so you see here this isn't deepenough we gotta move this bracket frame backmaybe a 1/16" adjusted the frame bracket and i'll recutthis on some clean edges there, perfect re-measuring this to get a perfect depthcut here got to measure an 1-3/16" from the back of this comb oneach side you get a good clean cut that took me about two hours initially to setit up and do tests cuts like this this is plenty tight i mean i can get itout and put it back together just fine
you glue this clamp this let us sitovernight and it will be completely strong very tight and i've read on theharbor freight website where people couldn't get this thing to work can i don't know how they couldn'tbecause the second time i set this up i had all the measurements and knewexactly what i needed to do so now you guys have the measurements the only drawback i see of this is themanual is wrong in some places this has to be a 7/16" template guide andnot a 1/2". one place in the manual it will say 7/16" in another place in themanual is a 1/2"
you got to use a 7/16" collar onthis because a 1/2" won't fit in here and that's another gripe that peoplehave on the harbor freight product review forums is they can't get a 1/2" collar in these 1/2" finger combs because the manual is incorrect insome of the areas like it says 23/32" from the face of the router whenit's only 18/32" or 19/32" to get a very tight fit 23/32" will make it way too tightand you'll never get your joint together 19/32" or even 18/32" will fit perfectly so now you know how to set your harborfreight router up with a bit
i would recommend getting a longer shankthen the one that comes with this i don't know if they make those my checkat lowe's or home depot and see if they have a longer shank but this is the router bit set that iuse and i'm just using the 1/2" dovetail so the shank length on this 1/2" dovetail bit is about 1.15" if you can find one with a longer shank it will make a seating this bit in thecollet a lot easier because this it only has like the tip of this thingsitting in there and i've actually had
this come out and grind into this so that's something you have to reallywatch is making sure your bit is completely in the collet.