Building furniture can be a tedious, painstaking process of measurements, cutting, sanding, more measurements, more cutting, and the ever-present risk that a single mistake could force you to start over from scratch. While there’s no perfect strategy for building the perfect piece of furniture, there are tools you can use that’ll help you avoid mistakes and succeed in putting together a beautiful piece of furniture.
One of the best examples of this is the Festool DOMINO joining system, which offers professional and do-it-yourself furniture builders with revolutionary cutting methods, straightforward indexing features, and an adjustable mortise sizing. With this tool at your side, your furniture building efforts will lower the stress of potential mistakes, improve your enjoyment of the building process, and make you more efficient.
Adjustable and Accurate Mortising
The mortise-and-tenon joint has been the standard in the woodworking community for years due to its incredible strength and easy construction. This joint is made up of a tenon—sometimes called a “tongue”—on a workpiece that slides into a hollowed-out mortise, like the one seen below.
What gets tricky about mortises is the accuracy required to make sure you get the perfect width, depth, and shape without needing to resort to trial-and-error. With the Festool Domino system, making perfect mortise-and-tenon joints can be as simple as matching your cutter size to the size tenon you want to use to create mortises that can be 8-14mm in mortise thickness and up to 140mm in depth.
There are a lot of good tools you can use for your building efforts, but when you use either the Domino DF 500 or the Domino XL 700, you’ll get to make use of a unique drill bit style cutter that spins and oscillates, allowing you to create mortises in easily adjustable sizes and depths. This unique feature, when coupled with the Domino’s other versatile qualities, means that your tool adapts to the job at hand, instead of the other way around.
This level of customization and accessibility removes the busy work and gets right to the point, saving you time and patience while also making the mortise-and-tenon joinery process efficient, easy, and enjoyable!
The Perfect Alignments
If there’s any skill you need to master in order to make great furniture, it’s knowing how to make flawless alignments. Crooked, or mismatched alignments can leave your furniture wobbly, unwieldy, or generally unstable, and that’s never ideal.
With the Festool Domino, however, you never have to waste precious time and energy on obsessing over the potential for mistakes, as this unique and easy-to-use tool reduces the risk of errors and seamlessly creates perfect alignments every time, even when working at an angle!
Both the Domino DF 500 and the Domino XL 700 are equipped with indexing pins that allow for quick and accurate alignments against the edge of whatever piece you’re working with. These tools also allow you to adjust the mortise width with a simple turn of a dial, which goes a long way towards easy alignments that make joining panels a breeze.
Joinery Made Easy
With the Festool Domino, no longer does joinery have to be a tedious and methodical task that demands hours of cautious work. Instead, the Domino’s rapid and easily repeatable mortising action, along with the easy changeover of cutters, make each tenon joinery a faster, easier, and more accurate process than ever before.
The Domino is available in two different models you can use for a wide range of joint sizes, types of wood, and other specifications. Adding either of these tools to your repertoire can cut down on unnecessary busy work, reduce the time needed for do-overs, and help make the perfect mortise-and-tenon joints every time. Simply put, the precision is all in the tool.
