Spacing Slats Evenly

Posted: Wednesday, July 16, 2025 at 07:24 AM | Categories: Woodworking

When I built the love seat I described in my previous post, one of the assembly tasks for the seat was to screw slats to the frame spaces a quarter inch apart. Since each slat was 46 inches wide, I had to come up with a unique approach to doing this consistently with only a single pair of hands.

The simplest solution would be to just cut a piece of 1/4 plywood 46 inches wide and insert it in place. Unfortunately, any pieces of 1/4 inch plywood I had that long wasn't straight enough to do the job and I'd need another set of hands or a clamp to hold it flat between the slats.

I tried cutting smaller pieces of plywood, but they kept falling through the slats.

Remembering that I had a high end 3D printer upstairs in my office, I quickly came up with a solution. I crafted a set of T-shaped shims that solved my problem in a variety of ways.

I made all of the sides 1/4 inches in width so I could insert them in any orientation and they'd still do the job. I made the top of the T an inch and a half wide so it would sit comfortably on top of the slats. I printed 4 of them so I could use them on both ends and on both sides of a slat. What you see in the image below is the spacers placed on the already assembled love seat, I forgot to take a picture during assembly.

I created the spacers using Tinkercad, it's a very simple design, you can find the design at Quarter Inch Spacer 2 ways.

Previous Post: Drilling Holes Consistently Across Multiple Pieces

Header image: JOhn M. Wargo