Craftsman 17539 Operation Manual - Page 11

_ WARNING: Do not allow familiarity with tools to make you careless. Remember that a careless fraction of a second is sufficient to inflict serious injury. ,_k WARNING: Always wear safety goggles or safety glasses with side shields when operating power tools. Failure to do so could result in objects being thrown into your eyes resulting in possible serious injury. APPLICATIONS You may use this tool for the purposes listed below: • Cutting precise mating oval slots in hard wood, soft wood, plywood and particle board SPLINE JOINERY Spline joinery is one of the strongest methods of joinery used in woodworking. When glue is properly applied to a spline and to the joint area of the wood pieces being connected, a large surface area receives the adhesion properties of the glue. This forms a strong joint. Traditional spline joinery requires cutting slots with a router or table saw. Small, thin strips of wood must then be cut to fit inside the slots and act as splines. Newer methods of spline joinery use a plate or biscuit joiner to cut precise mating oval slots in adjoining boards. This biscuit joiner is a fast, simple, and accurate plungecutting tool that can be used to cut slots in hardwood, softwood, plywood, particle board, and other pressed woods. Football shaped wafers, called biscuits, are then placed inside the slots with glue and used to help line up adjoining surfaces. When a water based glue is used, the biscuits swell in the joint, making an extremely strong and firm bond. White glue, yellow glue, carpenters glue, hide glue and aliphatic resin glue are examples of water-based glues.This bonding technique has traditionally been limited to making edge-to-edge joints. However, with the use of your new biscuit joiner, biscuits can now be easily used to connect butt, miter, and T-joints. Biscuit joining can be as strong as mortise and tenon, tongue and groove, standard spline, and doweled joints. In most cases the material around the biscuit will break before the biscuit itself will break. A greater surface area is exposed to glue in a biscuit joint, making the seams stronger. A variety of spline joints can be made using the biscuit joiner. The number and size biscuits needed for each joint depends on the thickness of the wood and the length of the joint. In general, the small #0 biscuits should be used for miter cuts in 3/4 in. materials. The larger biscuits should be used for edge-to-edge joinery. When joining 1-1/2 in. thick materials, stack two biscuits, one above the other. For example, use this method when joining 2 in. x 4 in. dressed lumber. When joining even thicker materials, use additional biscuits, stacked above each other. When making edge-to-edge joints for tabletops, workbenches, cutting boards, etc. the more biscuits you use, the stronger the joint will be. TURNING ON/OFF THE BISCUIT JOINER See Figure 4. To turn on the biscuit joiner, depress the switch trigger. Release the switch trigger to turn the biscuit joiner off. When operating the biscuit joiner, hold the tool with both hands. Keep one hand on the rear handle and place your other hand on the fence to hold the tool steady against the workpiece. This tool has a dual grip rear handle that allows the operator to choose from two different hand positions and use the one that is more comfortable. UPPERHAND PLACEMENT PLACEMENT Fig. 4 11