Okay, I realize that in my last post I talked about jigs, but didn’t really show any real ones. Such is life. I will redeem myself in this post.

Here’s an example of one of them. Actually a set. It’s a set of four (perfect) right angle jigs. They are used to make the big rectangles for the coop, and to help making framing the doors easier. In the below photo you can see one of our mitered doors in the jig. It’s sitting there waiting for the glue to dry. The strap clamp (the blue thing) keeps everything tight.

How to frame up the miters you ask? Well, I mounted some mostly-straight 1x2s to our one bench, to making door framing easier. (With any luck, we need to make a lot of these, so this setup will save a lot of time.)

Again, that’s a pretty simple setup. Just some boards screwed to the bench, at a perfect right angle. It seems simple, but it saves a LOT of time when you are trying to frame up a door with 45 degree miter joints.

Here’s something we put togther today. It allows us to handle the parts of the door frames:

You slide the 1×4 into the jig (we have pins–actually 1/4″ bolts–to help lock in the depth). Then you have a stable “clamp” for the wood. No “hold fasts”. No clamps. Just slide the wood in and it’s held pretty darn tight. This jig is set up to handle the three different heights we are dealing with. (The photo shows a piece of scrap–our normal stuff has miters at both ends.)

You then hold the joiner to the 45 degree angle (the miter cut) and cut the biscuit. We have a Porter-Cable biscuit cutter and Evelyn is in love with it. It makes this assembly work SO much easier (we tried corrugated nails, and they were a pain in the ass…V nails are too expensive and not robust enough…we’d rather deal with the glue dry time).

The end result? Some nice looking coop doors. I think these look better than some houses!

That top right (short) door was our first using the biscuits. You can see that it has a much tighter joint than the corrugated nails (larger door below). Plus, as Evelyn pointed out, it just FEELS stronger. It feels like one piece. Behold the power of glue and biscuits.