 An introduction to dado-stacks for beginners. Olah Woodworkers, Paul Carlson here, a small workshop guy. Excuse my left eye, it's still clearing up after a doctor gave me a shot and he hit a blood vessel. What is a dado-stack and what is it used for? Well, a dado-stack is used to create a dado in a workpiece. A dado is kind of a slot going, you know, used for joinery. In this particular case I'm doing some under the bed drawers and I'm going to put the bottom into this slot. So this is the side. Now I could run that workpiece over my regular table saw again and again each time moving the fence and eventually use the regular kerf blade on my table saw to get this cut out. But it would take multitude of passes plus a lot of fine tuning. So a dado-stack would be an alternative and probably something you want to add to your table saw tools or accessories sooner than later. The dado-stack is a set of blades that are designed to be put together. So you have an outside blade and you have another outside blade. You could just use those two together and that certainly gives you a wider than a normal saw blade kerf. But you can also start adding what we call chippers and shims in order to create stacks of different widths for whatever you're doing. For example, the one I just showed you is half inch plywood. I want to put half inch plywood in there. Half inch plywood is not really a half an inch. It's like 16 millimeters or 0.47 of an inch. So in this box they tell me what combination of setup I need in order to accomplish that same width. Now you want to set it up and you want to test it on scrap pieces before you put it on your good work pieces. So that's kind of what it's about. It just allows you to get a thicker blade on your table saw allowing you to be much more productive when it comes to cutting rabbits and cutting dados. Small workshop guy, signing off.