Still exploring the Festool's DOMINO.

Since this thing looks and sort of works like a biscuit
joiner I assumed the presets for the fence were
the distances from bottom of fence to the center
of the mortise. Lacking a metric ruler or caliper
I didn't notice that the center of the mortise for
each of the presets was actually be cut at half the
expected distance from the fence.

Then I realized that I was going at things all wrong.
The Fence to Mortise Centerline was designed to
work with specific stock thicknesses - and THAt is
what these presets are for - given stock of the
corresponding thickness, each preset will cut a
mortise centered on the stock thickness. This is
in keeping with the DOMINO's "symetric" approach
- reference your mortise of either built in, retract-
able "stop pins" and you cut a mortise with the
long axis center exactly at 45mm from either
stop pin. That means you can reference off
the right side of a part and one reference face,
flip the piece around to reference off a mortise
on the face 90 degrees away - from the LEFT
end using the left stop pin.

So if you start with the stock thickness that
matches one of the presets they will automatically
center your mortise in the center of the thickness.
That means that if you accidently reference off
the face opposite the one you wanted to reference
off of - you still get the mortise in the same place
WITH NO LAYOUT LINES - NO CENTERLINE, NO MORTISE
STOPS.

These fence to mortise centerline also comes in
real handy when you want to do a "step back"/
"reveal". Imagine a 1 1/2" x 1 1/2" square table leg
and you want to mortise and tenon the 5/8" (16mm)
thick so the outside face of the apron is set back
from the outside face of the leg by about 1/8"
(3.5mm). It is not only easy to use the DOMINO
to do this - but with just the two necessary presets
written on the inside (non visible area) of the two
parts - you can do it exactly the same - an hour later,
a day later or a year later. Imagine trying that
with the Leigh FMT jig or a dedicated mortising
machine. Your layout lines are inside the joint.

If and when I can restore ftp uploading to Adobe
GoLive I'll be putting up some more pages on things
I haven't seen anywhere about the built in capabilities
of the DOMINO. Have posted two illustrations to
alt.binaries.pictures.woodworking that may make
the text description above a lot clearer. Subject
line is the same as this message.

Questions, suggestions etc. to improve the two
illustrations will be appreciated.

charlie b