Took me 3 years to realize I was loading my dado stack backwards

Last week at a shop in Portland, an old timer watched me set up and just goes 'you know those teeth are facing the wrong way right?' and I felt like such an idiot. Has anyone else had a basic tool trick totally slip past them for way too long?

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juliawalker1mo ago

Three years is nothing. I ran a cabinet shop for eleven years before I realized my miter gauge had a second set of holes for the fence that I never used. That little discovery changed how I cut picture frames completely. But the real kicker was the dado stack. I was a full five years in before an old master carpenter pointed out that I had the chipper blades in the wrong order. The cuts were always rough and I just assumed that was how a dado stack worked. Once I flipped them around, the bottoms of the grooves came out smooth as glass. It's those little things nobody tells you that make you feel like a fool for the longest time.

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nathan_barnes1mo ago

Found the same thing with my dado stack, spent a year blaming the wood before a buddy showed me the blade order.

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