Inside Phil's Bunker
Creating Templates
We will start with a simple template project. We are going to make a box that is 6” wide, 8” long and 4 1/2” tall with 1/4 box joint fingers. The material is 3/8” hardwood. So, we plug in 4 1/2 for the board width, ¼ for the bit width, ½ for the cut depth and 0 for the bit angle. This yields a centered template that has shorter fingers on either end.
Note that each finger has the number of 1/32” increments written on it. So the two end fingers are 4/32”(1/8”) while the rest of the fingers are 8/32” (1/4”, our bit width). If this is ok you can proceed to printing your template out. However, we want to have all fingers be the same size so we need to move all the fingers by 4 increments (1/8”) either left or right.
To do this,
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Click on the editor tab
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Click on the all button
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Then click on the right move button 4 times
We now have this:
Note: This is essentially the same as an Incra LS Positioner stock template and we would of course normally not bother making this one. You could also get this same template by unchecking the "centered" box in the equal tab.
Once you are satisfied with your template, you should first save it and then print it out. See the section