The great HGTV domino hoax.

[Packard]

The HGTV show “Fixer to Fabulous” is hosted by Dave and Jenny Marrs.  Jenny does the design work and Dave acts as the general contractor and also makes some of the special projects in his shop in his barn.

In an older show I was watching he was building the shelves for a large pantry cabinet.  It was about 8 feet tall and about 8 feet wide.  The unit looked like a grid with 24” x 24” openings.  A total of 16 openings.

In his shop he was building the face frame which he would be adding to the shelving unit on site with a nail gun.

On the show he was shown at the beginning of the face frame build.  He was using a domino machine and he said, “I will be assembling this with dominoes”.  The face frame material appeared to be 3/4” x 2-1/2”.

However, when he was shown later doing the installation onsite, each joint clearly showed two pocket holes located at the center of each piece of stock.

My guess is he changed construction methods after he realized he did not have bar clamps to span the 8 foot structure and he switched to pocket holes.

He could have used both, if he placed his pocket holes wider.  But that that did not appear to be the case.

The should have re-shot the assembly scene or simply edited it out.

I don’t think he could have driven the pocket hole screws through the dominoes.

But I don’t use dominoes, so what do you think?

I think he could have done the glue up in smaller sections and then a 30” bar clamp would have been fine. 

Of course I am guessing:

1.  That he actually abandoned the dominoes
2.  Why he used the pocket holes

Anyway, what do you think?

 

[Michael Kellough]

How would you clamp an 8 foot wide assembly of stiles and rails?

Pocket hole screws are a great way to clamp each rail to it’s stile. If the rail is 2-1/2” wide there is enough room for a pair of pocket holes to straddle a 5 or 6mm Domino. If two Dominos are used a single pocket hole screw could work in between the tenons.

The pocket hole screws are self drilling and could be driven into a Domino but it would need to be already glued into the stile.

 

[cpw]

You shouldn't need an 8' bar clamp since you can just clamp across two stiles instead of all the way end to end.  For the next section, just offset the clamps a little bit.

 

[Packard]

It looked like he used the factory spacing for double pocket holes.  That is narrow enough to fit on 1-1/2” wide stock.  Would that have left enough room for a domino?

In any case, would you need both?  If I were inclined to use pocket holes, then I would probably be satisfied with just the pocket holes.

He face nailed the face frame onto the cabinet box grid.  That would provide all the stability the face frame would need.

In any event, I think he simply changed his mind while under way and they never reshot the footage to make the correction. 

An easy oversight to make.

 

[Michael Kellough]

Using both pocket crews and Domino’s simplifies face frame assembly.

With the proper jigs making the mortises for Domino’s and screws is relatively undemanding repetitive work. A chance to save your A game for more critical tasks.

The shortcomings and benefits of the two methods are complimentary.

By themselves Dominos don’t do anything to close the joint but they do align the parts.

By themselves pocket hole screws tend to misalign the parts (especially when wet glue is in the joint) but they do draw the parts together. You can leave the big clamps in the shop.