Rockler, Lee Valley and several other companies sell set-up bars for use on machinery like router tables and table saws, but there are some other great uses for these tools–including laying out joinery for drawers.

In this case, I used them while building new drawers for my kitchen that require bottom-mounted drawer slides. Because of their design, the slides needed to sit exactly 1/4 in. from the drawer bottoms, which in my case I made from 1/2-in. plywood, rabbeted to fit into 1/4 in. grooves.

Normally, one might grab a combination square for this lay out task, but I had temporarily “misplaced” mine. So to measure all the joinery for the drawer bottoms I used my set-up bars–it was just as easy as a square for aligning the parts.

I laid out the grooves by first placing the 1/4 in. brass bar at the bottom of one of the drawer sides. This provided the 1/4 in. clearance required for my bottom-mounted slide. Then I butted the plywood up against set-up bar, and used by fingers to check that the bar sat flush with the bottom edge of the drawer side. I used a pencil to mark the edges of the plywood on the drawer. (I used the plywood piece, rather than a 1/2 in. set up bar, because the plywood was actually 12 mm–a little under what I needed.)

To mark the location of the groove, I placed the 1/4-in. brass bar between the pencil marks, aligning one edge with the top mark, and then drawing a line on the other side of the brass bar to mark the bottom. I used the lines to set up the fence on the table saw, which was equipped with a 1/4 in. dado blade.

I used the 1/4-in. set-up bar to set the depth of the cut, too.

To lay out the rabbet on the plywood, I used the 1/4-in. bar again to measure down from the top of the plywood and also in from the edges. With those lines marked, I lined them up with the dado blade and rabbeted the edge.

I used the bars one last time to check my measurements at the bottom.

I won’t be trading in my square any time soon, but in a pinch, the set-up bars worked well.

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