Is Rob Cosman dovetail seminar worth the cost?

[Chris Atzinger]

Hi,

I am struggling a bit to make sound, good looking handcut dovetails. I have actually challenged my self to make a dovetail-a-day. Unfortunately my day 3 dovetails aren't that much different from my day 18 dovetails!

My local woodcraft is hosting Rob Cosman in June, and there is a 4hr seminar that has some open spots. I was told that this really isn't a hands-on type of session, but mostly Rob teaching and taking questions. The cost is $75.

Has anyone done this before? Was it helpful? Is there somewhere else I should be looking for some tutelage?

Thanks!
Chris

[Mike Henderson]

Making a good dovetail is mostly a matter of practice once you understand the process. You can buy Rob's DVD and get sufficient instruction to get started. If you're having problems, the best thing would be to work with someone more experienced who can look at what you're doing and offer suggestions.

If I was in your situation, I'd look for some hands-on instruction. It doesn't have to be Rob Cosman - many people can do good dovetails, and could provide you the help you need.

Mike

[Andrew Pitonyak]

I expect that sitting and watching would not help significantly more than watching the video except that you can perhaps see the fine details of what is done. As an example, does he split the line or run directly against the line while cutting.

My limited experience is cutting dovetails for one drawer out of hard maple. The fit is rock solid but it looks nothing like those pretty dovetails that I admire by others.

How is your sawing? The one thing that I did do is to practice my cutting. My cutting is not great, but it is at least ok. I do believe that for those perfect dovetails, you must be able to to do a few things (with which I struggle):

1. Cut a straight line. I found that while cutting the tails I sometimes do not cut a perfectly flat as is seen by placing a straight edge along it.
2. Cut perpendicular to the face of the board. If it is not straight, you probably need the wider end to be towards the inside of the joint so that it will snug up as you the joint is pushed together.
3. I cut the tails first and then I cut the pins, so, I must be able to hold the items securely and mark along the joint. When I did this, I noticed that some of my tails are not perfectly straight (because I see a slightly curved line). That is a good indicator that I need more practice in step (1) and that there will be fitting problems. Perhaps I should check this before marking.
4. Now the item with which i struggled the most; Where exactly must I cut for a good tight fit? I rarely see anyone show a really tight image of the cut with the line showing or not when the joint is cut, so, I must guess. I admit that much depends on how well you get close while marking. If you were at the class, you might be able to peek at how this looks.

I considered practice dovetails, and I decided that if I did this, then I would have only two tails so that I could more accurately and quickly judge how things fit based on what I cut. I found it difficult to determine which set was off I cut eight tails on my drawer.

The people that I know that met Rob Cosman were all impressed with him on many fronts. Given the opportunity, I would likely attend, but, if I were able to find someone that would hand cut dovetails with me and correct me as I go and perhaps show me how they do it one on one, I would do that instead.

[David Keller NC]

Chris - From the standpoint of "worth it", it depends on how you think about it. If you're really having trouble with something, nothing beats a person to talk to that has conquered the difficulties. One can't ask questions (and expect an answer) from a book or a video.

4 hours of instruction for $75 is very little money, unless the class size is 75 people - but I doubt that at a local Woodcraft store.

Whether $75 is worth it to you might depend a bit on your income & expenses. To many, $75 isn't all that much money. To a graduate student, it might be....

[Andrew Gibson]

If you make your way down to florida, you can hang out in my shop all day and we can cut joints out of wood in my scrap bin till your hearts content.
I don't claim to be the best at dovetails but I am confident in my abilities to make tight fitting and strong joints.

[Brian Kent]

A $75 workshop sounds like a very fair price. Not the only way to learn, but a good way.

[Mike Siemsen]

Chris,
If it is not a hands on workshop where the instructor can see what you are doing wrong it probably won't be much help. Most of the people I teach dovetailing to have to be taught how to saw, and how to sharpen and use a chisel. There are several different videos on youtube that you could watch. You are Cincinatti, while it is a bit more money for a hands on workshop I would think Kelly Mehler's School would be a good option. If you can wait until October come to WIA in Covington, KY, I will help you myself. I run the Handtool Olympics and dovetailing is one of the events. We always give tutorials to any one that wants one. We are in the Marketplace so it costs about $5 to get in. Rob Cosman was there last year and I wouldn't be surprised if he is there again this year cutting dovetails and selling plane irons and such. Chuck Bender is doing a workshop on cutting dovetails if you plan on attending the conference. He would also probably help you at his booth.
Mike Siemsen

[Mike Henderson]

4 hours of instruction for $75 is very little money, unless the class size is 75 people - but I doubt that at a local Woodcraft store.

Check on the number of people in the class. Rob Cosman would have to get a decent fee for offering the class, especially since he's not local. Unless the store is subsidizing the cost there'd have to be a fair number of people in the class to make it worth Rob's while.

Mike

[Mick Zelaska]

I just took Rob's hand plane class at Woodcraft with 7 people in the class. Later that day taught a 4 hour hand-cut dovetails class with 6 people. The Woodcraft people told me he likes to keep his classes small.

[Prashun Patel]

Chris-
I looked at your pix. I am no expert, but am learning as are you. First, it appears that you are indeed improving - just not fast enough for your own liking.

I think you might make a lot of progress right here on the 'Creek, by simply posting pix of a single attempt: after marking the tails, after cutting the tails, after cleaning the sockets, after marking the pins, after cutting the pins, after cleaning the sockets.

To my eye, it appears that you are having trouble cutting the pins properly; you appear to be cutting fairly straight - just a little wide. I think the problem may be the marking of the pins. What are you using to transfer the marks? A pencil?

Try starting with smaller, wider spaced tails, too. I know small pins look nicer, but having more space eases the ability to accurately xfer the marks to the pin board.

A last trick is to cut a 1/32" rabbet on the inside of the tail board down to the base line. It greatly eases the registering and marking of the pin board.

[Sean Hughto]

If your 18th are not much better than your 3rd, I think you may be making some fundamental mistake. You may be setting up you sawing such that your body is out of position. You may be failing to make careful enough marks. Something fundamental is wrong. The question is to find out what. A DVD - some pictures and posts here - a class - a friend nearby -a club nearby. Once you figure out the major error, you'll start to see improvement.

[Chris Atzinger]

Thanks for the replies.

Andrew, I am in Cincy, so trip to Florida to practice dovetails might be a hard sell at home, but I genuinely appreciate the offer.

Mike, I went to the vendor show at WIA last year and will definitely go back this year. I have toyed with the idea of taking classes there. The idea is sounding better everyday.

I have pasted a link to some pics of the first dozen or so joints that I cut by hand. The improvement from #1 to-#4 is dramatic (considering the first set would never go together), to give you an idea of where I am.

https://picasaweb.google.com/catzing...eat=directlink

I would agree that I am making a fundamental mistake, consistently. I also agree that I definitely need more sawing practice. I'll keep plugging away until I run out of wood!

Thanks for the suggestions!

-Chris

[Pam Niedermayer]

...I would agree that I am making a fundamental mistake, consistently. I also agree that I definitely need more sawing practice. I'll keep plugging away until I run out of wood!...

While I appreciate your persistance, plugging away doesn't always help, one tends to keep making the same mistake. It may help a lot if you have a video camera of some sort and a way to aim it at yourself while you saw.

Based on scanning a couple of your photos, I'd suggest the following:

1) Make sure that the ends you're dovetails are absolutely square, 90° cut

2) Be careful with marking the baseline: set your marking gauge to the board thickness (I assume both boards are the same thickness), then mark both boards, careful that the gauge is holding the setting. Saw precisely to that baseline.

3) Just for kicks and to help get you out of a rut, saw the first board without any markings but the baseline. It's very easy for humans to bifurcate distances, so do that starting in the board's middle and work out. Then mark the second board based on the first and saw that.

4) If you haven't discovered the problem by now, try putting the boards in a vise at 6° off vertical, so you'll saw straight down for the angle cut. Do one side of each tail/pin, then offset the board to the vise in the other direction and saw the other side of each tail/pin.

Pam

[Jim Koepke]

4) If you haven't discovered the problem by now, try putting the boards in a vise at 6° off vertical, so you'll saw straight down for the angle cut. Do one side of each tail/pin, then offset the board to the vise in the other direction and saw the other side of each tail/pin.

As a comment on this, it is also easier when sawing without a tilt to saw all of one side and then the other of the tails and pins.

Much better than trying to change the angle with each cut.

jtk

[David Keller NC]

Chris - A few observations based on your photos:

1) What Pam said - the ends of your boards must be absolutely square to the faces/edges of your boards. Anything else, and you're already starting off with a misalignment. Most of us plane the end grain of our work pieces on a shooting board. There are 2 reasons for this - one is to make sure they're 90 degrees. The second is that it makes knife cuts that mark the lines much more visible.

2) Examine your tools. You don't need really expensive tools, but you do need reasonable quality ones that are tuned to do the job. Specifically, that starts with your marking equipment - you absolutely require a highly accurate small square. The plastic kind from Home Despot won't cut it.

You also require a marking knife. Preferably, this should be a very sharp, one-bevel knife. It's possible to do it with a double-bevel xacto, but it's more difficult, which adds to your learning curve.

You need a bevel gage, or a dovetail template. Eventually, you will be able to do dovetails without this, because you can eyeball the angles and cut straight. But when you're a beginner, you have to have it, because you're trying to analyze whether you cut the line straight. If you don't have a line that's straight to begin with, you can't analyze the saw cut.

You need a decent dovetail saw. Again, the saws they sell in Home Despot won't do the deed. They can be made to work, but that typically requires taking out the extreme set of these saws and re-profiling the teeth into a rip cut, not a cross-cut. This is not a job for a beginner. There are many decent dovetail saws, but the hands-down least expensive western saw that's actually a saw instead of a saw-shaped object is the Lee Valley new-age dovetail saw. If you prefer the traditional look, the Lie-Nielsens are the second cheapest that are very effective. If you don't want to spend that kind of money, post a note in the SMC classifieds asking for an antique dovetail saw sharpened by someone that knows what they're doing (do not accept a "well, it cuts well for me" - you will wind up with 2 or 3 losers that you will then need to send out to someone that knows what they're doing).

You must either have a very sharp dovetail bevel chisel (harder) or a fretsaw and a very sharp dovetail saw (easier). The fretsaw is the exception - it can be a reasonably cheap Olson with a coarse blade (about $15).

3) Choose your woods carefully. Oak, maple and walnut are all abyssymal choices for beginning dovetail work. The are too hard, too dark, or too coarse. You need a reasonably soft wood that will take knife cuts well, and will not fight you on the saw strokes. I choose eastern white pine when I teach someone to do this for the first time. It works wonderfully, is cheap, generally has well-behaved grain, and is relatively easy to chop. It has one failing that is actually an advantage to a beginner - it crushes easily. That property teaches someone why you can't just put the chisel in the knifed baseline and whack away - it must be "sneaked up on". If you can't get EWP, then poplar, butternut, aspen, basswood and (less so) south american mahogany are all good 2nd choices.

4) This is extremely important - you must be able to see what you're doing. And I don't mean just generally see your workbench and where the saw handle is. It's absolutely critical that you have a supernova's amount of light on the workpiece, and that your eyes be good enough to see the lines well enough to distinguish the left and right sides of the knife cut. For most of us over the age of 35, that means reading glasses.

I teach beginners in either full sunlight, or preferably with 2 or 3 of those inexpensive, clamp-on aluminum reflectors that you can buy for $6 at Home Despot, with 150 watt spiral fluorescent bulbs. It may sound like overkill, but it isn't.

5) Your body stance is important - your wrist, forearm, upper arm, dominant eye and dominant side of your body should all be in the single plane of the saw stroke.

6) The start of your saw kerf is critically important - if it isn't exactly positioned so that it will obliterate one side of the knifed line (the waste side) and leaves the other sidewall of the knifed line, you're pretty much hosed on the joint fitting together from the saw. No amount of correction during the sawing of the tail or pin will correct for this. In fact, trying to correct the course of the saw when sawing down to the baseline guarantees that your joint won't go together. You will eventually develop a feel for this - you want to control the cut so that the saw balances from left to right on the point of the teeth, and the side of the saw doesn't put any pressure on either sidewall of the kerf. If the saw binds, it means that you've let the saw lean one way or another for a couple of strokes, then corrected it - so the kerf is now a bit jagged and isn't straight.

7) Your grip is equally important to your body stance - most beginners want to strangle the saw handle, which creates torsion forces that take them off of their line. I've heard it said that you want to grip the saw like a bird - not os tight as to crush it, but not so loose that if flies away. In my experience, this is good advice.

8) Don't attempt to pare the sides of your tails or pins to get the joint to go together. David Charlesworth may be the only person alive on this planet that can do that sort of paring accurately enough to get a result that's pristine. For the rest of us, paring the sides of the tails or pins is pretty much a garantee for an ugly joint.

Remember that the air-tight joints straight from the saw that you see in dovetail videos is also completely unnecessary - you don't typically see that on furniture from the age of handwork - you see neat, decently fitting but not-quite-perfect dovetails.

If all of this sounds ridiculously anal, it is. But it absolutely is not out of reach of the average woodworker - it just takes analysis and critical thinking of what result you're getting from marking your lines, sawing the kerfs, and chopping out the waste, and then making adjustments to your technique, workspace or tools to get each of those operations up to your expectations.

Hope this helps - keep sawing, you'll get there.