I've been lurking for several weeks (or has it been several months?) now
and since I have a question or two, I guess that it's appropriate to post a
bio.  I'm 47 and design mixed signal ICs for a living.  My woodworking thus
far has consisted mostly of carpentry type stuff.  Pretty far from fine
woodworking.  My techniques come from 3 years of mandatory wood shop in
junior high school and what I have picked up here and in rec.ww.
   Which brings me to a question.  I am working of a railing for a deck
that I'm building.  Not being satisfied with the quick and dirty stuff
that contractors around throw together I though that I would make a "nicer"
railing.  Anyway, what I'm doing involves 

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Each horizontal piece is constructed of two pieces of redwood with a dado
in each to accept the vertical slat.  So I need twenty horizontal pieces
of wood, each with 9 dados in it for a grand total of 180 dados.  Thus
far, I've cut the dados with a saw and chisel but this takes about one hour
per piece of wood or 4 hours per section of railing.  Am I missing something
in the way of technique or tools (short of an old-fashioned 3 hp. DeWalt
router) here?  How were dados cut prior to power tools and are there any
specialized hand tools which make the job easier?  After all this cutting,
I see why contractors take the (ch)easy way out.

Tom Walley
tmw@h...

  Tom Walley  writes:

  

>  Am I missing something
>in the way of technique or tools (short of an old-fashioned 3 hp. DeWalt
>router) here?  How were dados cut prior to power tools and are there any
>specialized hand tools which make the job easier?  After all this cutting,
>I see why contractors take the (ch)easy way out.

  Lemme see if I can take a stab at what you're trying to do here.

  You want the balusters (what you call the "vertical slats") to be 
housed in dados cut in the rails, and that these rails sandwich the
balusters to form, in essence, a through mortice after they are 
assembled?

  If that's the case, what I would do is dado a piece of wood that's 2 
times the width of the rails using a dado plane of the appropriate width.
These will go surprisingly fast, and most of your time will be spent
positioning the batten, from which the plane references. 

  Dado planes come in a variety of widths, typically in increments of 1/8", 
and are solely dedicated to a particular width (wooden ones, that is, since
it's possible to do the same with combination planes that can do dadoing, 
e.g. the #45, #46, #47, etc.)

  After you cut all the dados, rip the board down the center, and presto,
you have your pieces finished in nearly half the time.

  Another option you could choose, which will speed things up even more,
is to cut a broad and shallow groove on the top rail, which is made from
a solid piece of wood. The balusters fit into this groove, and are simply
toe-nailed in place there. With the balusters fit into the dados in the
bottom rail, there is little chance of the balusters' tops moving laterally
(toward each other).

  BTW, what I've described is sorta how balusters are fit into stairs 
and rails. The tops of the balusters fit into a shallow groove and are
nailed. The bottoms of the balusters are often tenoned into the treads.
The better work has them dovetailed to the treads. 

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Patrick Leach
Just say Railing and stairbuilding can be your bestest pal-zee when doing
         handwork.
etc.
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