memzey":8zxhhver said:
Surprised you find them lacking in accuracy Custard.
There's a couple of reasons why I say that.
Firstly, lets say you've got a big cabinet side, say 500mm deep in solid timber, if you cut a dado with a dado stack on a saw table, and then measure the depth of the dado with your callipers, you'll often find the depth varies by a few tenths of a mill across the width. Basically the workpiece has lifted slightly at some point, or it was fractionally bowed, and that's transferred directly to the depth of the dado.
Another area is the
repeatability of components. Not a problem if you have a digital rise and fall on your saw table, but I don't, so if I need to repeat a cut in the future to make another component it's unlikely to
exactly match something from the first batch.
I find that I hit these two problems less frequently when I'm using a router to cut a housing/dado, the router rides over any bowing in the workpiece and delivers a more consistent depth, plus the practical reality is that in a professional workshop there's always half a dozen routers, so you tend to leave each of them set up for a specific task until that particular project is
completely finished and despatched to the client, which means it's easier to go back and recut a component complete with a dado that's
identical to a previous component.
Just my experiences, other people may have a different take.