Dado or Trench Cuts using a Miter Saw

That is when you cut notches out of two pieces of wood and you can clamp them together like that. Ideally you'd have a router to do this, but I don't have a router, so. . . I just got this miter saw a couple of weeks ago, and a guy on my Facebook page named Chris. One of the 9% of my Facebook followers who are actually men. He suggested a video by a guy named Justin Pre witt on how to use a miter saw to do dado cuts. Here's two that I did last night.  They're a little bit messy on the inside as you can see but they lock perfectly.  An the fact that they're messy doesn't really matter because you're not even gonna see it. The big issue for me with these cuts is that's far as I can tell, with this particular miter saw, there's no way to lock it.  See right here? This little dot this is what keeps it. . . That's the stopper right there.  I needed to figure out something that was gonna stop it right there so that I could cut just enough through the piece of wood without cutting all the way through it. After a lot of experimentation - this was my test piece - I managed to find this one bolt which is just the right height so that it won't go all the way through. Unfortunately the consequence of having raised that stop up means that the saw blade no longer has enough opportunity to get all the way through the wood at an equal depth all the way through.  And let me show you what I'm talking about on that. See? It's not evenly cut all the way through. So I had to do to fix that was create a false fence using a couple of two by fours. Little pieces.  I don't actually have the ability to move this fence forward so I kind of had to improvise. Now it has cut all the way through evenly on both sides. As you can see, it's not even, but I got something for that too. In Justin's video, he used something kind of like this.  I actually found that a little putty knife actually worked a little bit better for me.  Just matter of preference I suppose. Last night I also busted out my jig saw Once you get both pieces cut properly and you get them filed down a little bit and get all the extra spots taken out.  They fit together real nicely like that. Alright, y'all ready for this?I LOVE these legs.  The first one of these I ever made was for my husband as a Father's Day present, and I just took some little two by twos and cut them short and made legs out of them.  And this has way more style.  This looks way better.  I'm SO excited about it, so thank you Chris and thank you Justin for hooking me up with this idea.  I'm gonna be making all kinds of stuff. I can't tell if that's a bruise or if that's wood stain. Best Miter saw revie is here- https://pickthetools.com/best-miter-saw-reviews/