I recently made a jewelry cabinet with 9 drawers, the drawers have a velvet bottom and several of the drawers will have a number of dividers. Very practical and a lot of fun to make. Here is how.
I chose a regular carbide saw blade for the work, it makes a cut about 1/8″ wide. Take a piece of scrap wood about 3/4″x2″x10″ and using a miter attachment make a test cut to establish the exact width of your saw cut.
The drawer for this divider is 1″ deep so I will make the dividers 1″ deep as well. Use the cut you just made in the scrap wood as a gauge and cut your stock for the dividers to a thickness that will fit into the test cut, snug, but not tight. It should slide in with little effort.
Set the blade height exactly half the width of the divider pieces, in this case 1/2″. Use a test piece to get it right. This insures that the parts go together properly, any error doubles.
Now the fun part….
Put a piece of your thin stock into the test cut, this will be an indexing pin to locate cuts for proper, repeatable spacing. Secure the wood to your miter gauge so that the distance between the index pin in the test cut and the blade is the spacing you want for your dividers.
The pieces are bundled together and set against the jig. For these pieces I set the edge right against the saw cut in the jig, so that i cut a slot right at the edge of the divider. then place that first cut on the indexing pin and cut again. this can be repeated over and over and you will get a perfectly consistent spacing.
