Multi angle miter cuts

[Jeremy Patrick]

Looking for some education on multi angle cuts/joining.
now when you see the picture, it’s a last minute slap together something project, so please try and ignore how crappy this is. Want to redo this and have it look reasonably decent.
My dog would get his front paws up on the initial plywood surface and take down the cat food bowls to finish them off. (No other area for feeding the dogs couldn’t get to.). So the war began on how much of a fortress I needed to add to prevent him from this charade.
as you can see in the picture, the vertical piece sitting right in top of the plywood lip didn’t do it. So I added some more but with an angle so there was no chance of him reaching anything. It worked but the angles I was trying to put everything together with are an eyesore.
I tried to mess around with cutting angles on my mitre saw but couldn’t get anything that achieved what I needed. So I turned to cutting angles by hand.
if I can take a concept someone is talking about, and play around with test cuts, I can usually have it make sense in whatever jumbled way my mind puts the steps together. I’m hopefully missing a step or flipping something around my mind and just needing a bit of guidance to get me back on track.

my question is, what is the best way to cut this multi angled piece like this so it properly joins up in the middle?
1FBEACB4-609E-48E2-B65A-C8875C9F6793.jpg

[Edward Weber]

how did you want to join it? Butt joint, biscuits, dominos, lock miter, T&G

[Rich Engelhardt]

I believe you need to google this:

making a compound miter

That should steer you in the right direction.

[Jeremy Patrick]

Didn’t have a particular way. Wanted to get the cuts down so the pieces marry up nicely then go from there. I’ve put together other various joints with simple angles just can’t figure out how to get the angle cuts for this one.

[Jeremy Patrick]

I already have a single bevel dewalt. Built a decent number of things with various simple angles. Sometimes a simple concept gets flipped around like in a dyslexic way, so it just doesn’t make sense to me until I can see it in a different way and play with it.

[Maurice Mcmurry]

I would use the table saw and miter gauge. There are interactive compound angle calculators on the web that are very helpful. I have done a lot of trial and error with scraps in the past. With the help of the web I am getting the hang of doing the math. Your pets sound like they would be instantly popular on YouTube.

Compound Angle Calculator ::: Mitered and Butted Joints

[Jeremy Patrick]

Good call.
with enough time and scraps I will probably figure it out. Was just wanting to ask any tips or recommendations people could offer.

[Andrew Hughes]

If you can get it close but still have a gap. Try running a handsaw down the middle holding the pieces for the cut would be the next obstacle.
Good Luck

[Jeremy Patrick]

That is more or less what I ended up doing for what I took a picture of.
but in the interest of having cuts match up perfectly, even for something like this, I’ll have to keep tinkering.

[johnny means]

They're are many calculators online that will do the math for you. I use them all the time for larger box forms and get absolutely perfect seams around multiple corners. Alternately, you can pull angles from a CAD drawing. Look up stave calculators.

[andy bessette]

Use the compound miter calculator Maurice provided. Or a simple way to produce an attractive joint would be to let the face workpiece run through and scribe the secondary piece, on both sides, to produce a butt joint.

[Edward Weber]

I must not be seeing something in the photo correctly.
What part needs to be a compound cut?

[andy bessette]

I must not be seeing something in the photo correctly.
What part needs to be a compound cut?

The joint where the 2 shelf rails come together.

[Lee Schierer]

Our dog used to eat the cat food. I made a box about 2" on a side larger than the cat bowl. I left on end open and cut a doorway for the cat in one side so it looked like a dog house. I made spacers that fit in the front two corners that kept the cat bowl toward the back. To fill the dish, you pick up the box, fill the dish and set the box back over the dish. The dog never did figure out how to get the food. It worked on two other dogs as well.

[Thomas McCurnin]

Fine Woodworking had an article on the three approaches for compound angles on the table saw (September-October 2002).

The first is a trigonometry calculation, which is fine and will be 100% accurate in theory, but transferring that to a table saw setting yields inaccurate results.

The second is actual drawings of the joint from various angles. Again, it is accurate, but transferring those angles through measurement, setting a bevel gauge and setting up the table saw is where this approach falls flat.

The third approach skips the trig and skips the layout by picking the slope for the box or joint (say 10 degrees) and using a bevel gauge to transfer that angle to the table saw. And then using that table saw angle to make a set up block, about 18" long by something below the teeth of the saw blade, say 3"x3", ripping the length of the block and the two ends with that same angle. The set up block will set up the miter gauge on your table saw and the blade angle in one set up. To add a miter joint to the intersection, simply place a 45 degree drafting square to the front of the miter gauge (which has already been angled) and re-set the table saw tilt to correspond to that angle.

To clamp, rip some scrap at the same blade tilt angle and clamp using a jorgensen type hand screw clamp.