Reddit mentions of MLCS 17733 Katana 60-Degree Edge Banding Tongue and Groove, 2-Piece Set

Sorry it took so long to reply. Been busy in the shop.

Plywood. Love or hate it, right? There is nothing inherently wrong with using plywood. Plywood makes fantastic drawer bottoms. I have a big chunk of it in the middle of the top of the coffee table I'm building. I am even using it for door panels in the built-in closet I'm also working on. In each of these instances the edges of the plywood is completely concealed. Before the thought crosses your mind, slapping a 1/4" thick strip of hardwood does not conceal the edge. It looks like a piece of veneered plywood with a hardwood strip glued on. No finishing tricks will ever make it look good. I've tried. Oh how I have tried.


There are tricks to using plywood so nobody knows. For lower-grade furniture I have built for friends, I have used the hot-melt glue edgebanding. I only use it for painted pieces, because whatever they say the veneer is, it isn't and it will never match the walnut or cherry plywood. Unless you spend hours using tints and dyes to get it to match. Your time is money, so it would have been cheaper to just use solid wood. If you have a perfectly dialed in tablesaw, and have some serious balls, you can use a dado blade to hog out the plywood in-between the outer veneer layers. Modern ply uses 1/128th or maybe 1/64th" thick veneer, so you have very tight tolerances to work with. And they can't support any weight, so you have to MacGuyver some way of supporting the plywood while you do this. But then you glue in a strip of hardwood and it is nearly invisible. Or, you can do what I do and cheat.


I use plywood for building drawer boxes all the time. For the shop. I always use a dado to hold the plywood drawer bottom. This guy's use of a plywood drawer box with a luan bottom on what is portrayed as a piece of fine furniture detracts from the piece aesthetically so much that McIKEA crap looks like a Maloof original. I would have use solid maple sides 3/4" thick with a 1/2" thick front and back of maple, and maple ply in the bottom. All untreated. I'd route a 3/8" deep dado 1 1/2" wide on the drawer box front to back, and centered. On the inside of the drawer cavity I'd mount a 3/8" thick maple strip, just a smidge under 1 1/2" thick on each side. Wax both the groove in the drawer and the rail with a good wax like Renaissance Wax, and call it a day. That would look a million times better than the cheap Chinese drawer slide.


If you are starting woodworking, go to antique shops and ask permission to look at how older pieces of furniture were built. They didn't have plywood back in the 1800's and they had dressers, chests, tables, etc. as wide as could be. The name of that game is wood movement. Here is a 3m video by some dude on wood movement. Here is a calculator from Fine WoodWorking that you can use to figure out how much wood will move. I've built a Dining Table, and to accommodate the seasonal wood movement, I used breadboard ends (glued the middle 2", each end free to expand/contract) and attached it to the frame the same. (Screwed in the middle, and figure-8's on the corners.

Onto Dominoes. Full disclosure, I think 90%+ of Festool is overpriced plastic crap. Floating tennons are damn cool, and if I cannot jury-rig a horizontal mortiser, I might buy one. In this case, he has to use a floating tennon because the miter joint isn't working. So before you drop $1500+ on the latest plastic do-dad stop. Pull your head out of your butt and think. Maybe a miter is not the best joint for what I want to do... A 1/8" hardwood spline would have been a better choice than dominoes. Those floating tennon thingys are not cheap. A domino would be one of the last tools i'd buy. There are much better places to spend your money.


>A miter vs a dovetail should be mainly in aesthetics in the end right?

Nope. A miter has zero mechanical strength - the only thing holding it together is wood glue. With plywood only a half of the wood is a long grain to long grain joint, which is the strongest glue joint. Also, unless you have your tools dialed in perfectly, it is really hard to get two perfect 45^o joints. A miter does have the advantage of hiding all endgrain. A dovetail is self-squaring and provides a lot of glue surface. Also, because of how the dovetail is assembled, the grain on both pieces run in the same direction, so seasonal wood movement will not blow the joint apart.


Although it does show end-grain, the dovetail is almost universally seen as a hallmark of fine furniture. You can control where you see the end grain if you use half-blind dovetails. For this piece, I would attach the top (pins) to the sides (tails) with half-blind dovetails. this way, the top is unmarred by the tails' end-grain. I'd probably just use full dovetails to attach the bottom. The grain of all 4 sides would run left <-> right and up <-> down. This way, seasonal movement would only make the piece stick out from the wall 1/8" more or less depending on the season.


>Plus why is it better to use chisels? That to me sounds kinda snobby.

Chisels are not snobby. I am firmly in the middle of the Normite versus Neanderthal argument. I use power tools and hand tools alike. Some operations are best suited to one or the other, but there are no absolutes when you work with a once-living medium. Sometimes my random-orbital sander is the best way to get a piece ready to finish, and other times it just makes a mess of the delicate and wild grain of a burl. So I use a #80 scraper.


Every woodworker should have a decent set of chisels. I have a set of Marples, but it looks like they were bought out by Irwin. This looks like a good set for the money All 8 for $100 sounds like a good deal to me. I have the Narex mortise chisels and the cranked-neck paring chisels and they are more than adequate for what I use them for. Those paring chisels are just fucking awesome for cleaning out glue from the inside of joints.


Every woodworker should also have a #5 bench plane, and a low-angle block plane. I got my Stanley #5 for $5 at a flea market. Cleaning it up and sharpening the blade took ~45 minutes. I can cut a shaving that is too thin to measure with fractional calipers. Veritas planes are really nice, but $300 for only a marginal improvement over my $5 Stanley?


A set of scrapers will run you $20. If you don't have strong hands when you start using them, you bet your ass you will when you are done. A #80 is just a fancy holder for a larger scraper. Those are rare as hell at flea markets. I've only seen one, and I bought it for $20.


I hope this has helped you out. The things that have helped me the most are:

1. Fine Wood Working - I read it religiously. I study the gallery and read every article.
   
   
2. New Yankee Workshop - Nahm Abrams began this show as a carpenter, and ended it as a furnituremaker. I live on the South Shore, so his Yankee frugality - building his own tool stations - strikes a chord w/ me.
   
   
3. WoodWorks hosted by David Marks. - Although I am not a fan of contemporary design, his show helped me a lot. I didn't have the balls to try tung oil until I watched this show. He uses it on everything.
   
   
4. Woodnet forums A bunch of friendly peeps on a woodworking forum.
   
   
   I have seen both shows up on youtube and are popular re-runs on cable tv. Especially on the DIY channels in the wee hours of the morning. Set your DVR.
   
   Damn this got long. Send me a PM if you need advice. I cannot guarantee I'll respond right away, but I will respond.
   
   edit: fixed some formatting