I am teaching myself to cut dovetails. I am in no rush, so I have been gearing up to it slowly but methodically. First, I made sure the tools would not be an obstacle. I have good chisels (LV PM-11s) and learned to sharpen them properly (enough to make curls from end grain pine).
Then I built myself a shooting board and got the LV shooting plane (I had been coveting that plane for a long time, so it was a X-mas present to myself). Mastering the shooting board proved harder than I thought, but due to my lack of attention. Since every video makes it look so easy, I carelessly set up the plane and went to town. I was getting all sort of inconsistent results! The problem was that I wasn’t setting the blade properly: It was slightly out of parallel to the sole, which was making the plane cutting more aggressively at the bottom of the board, ruining the perpendicularity across its thickness. Once I noticed and fixed my mistake, everything became predictable and was able to square up the edges of a board in just a couple of passes. The momentum generated by the plane really helps a lot; it is a great tool.
Then I practiced sawing plumb and square. I have both the LV and the LN dovetail saw, and both work great, but I prefer the slightly longer blade of the LN, the taper (easier to stop in time before I saw past the baseline on the opposite side) and certainly the looks. So, slight edge to LN and decided to stick with it. The ongoing post on how to saw square was helpful because it summarized well the key points I have learned in my readings (particularly Stanley C’s advice). To me, as long as I keep my wrist, elbow and shoulder on the same plane and relax, the cuts come up pretty decent. Can’t stress the relaxing part enough. Starting the cut was my biggest challenge: I thought I was relaxed and taking most of the weight off the saw, but the truth was that I needed to be even more relaxed. Once I achieve that ‘zen’ state, everything flowed nicely.
All this took some time, since I can only spend an hour or two at most late at night every now and then. But finally, I was ready to try the real deal. I bought Cosmans’ video and watched it several times until I was sure I understood every step. I read a lot (books, threads, blogs, etc.) and watched other videos to gather additional info, but committed mostly to Cosman’s advice to keep things consistent (tails first, fret saw, etc.). Just as with sharpening, most approaches will take you to the finish line with enough practice, but sticking to one method at the beginning is useful. By the third dovetail, though, I added Derek’s suggestion of creating a knife wall to the baselines because mine where not coming straight nor crisp enough. That proved very helpful, since it made registering the chisel very easily when paring to the line. Oh, and good light, with a flexible arm lamp. Unless you have eagle eyes, good light is critical!
So far, I have only 6 under my belt (and that’s generous, because three of them shouldn’t even count) but I thought I would share my progress, so others can see how things evolve for someone like me, with little time to practice and no natural skill whatsoever. Hopefully this will encourage others by seeing that even though you will be many woodworking hours away from Derek’s quality dovetails; with a little practice and attention you should get progressively better. I am hoping that once I have a dozen of them they will start to come up acceptable for furniture that can move up the ladder (literally… all I build right now is only acceptable for my basement shop!)
So here they are, chronologically from left to right. The first one was purposely a ‘junk test’. I wanted to get a feeling quickly of where to focus my attention the most. As you can see, it is just a big mess, and I even splitted the board when hammering it together. As crazy as it sounds, it was very useful; it gave me a sense of how tight is too tight to split a board, among other things. The second one is just funny. See what I did there? Even after marking the waste, I removed the tails, and then proceeded to mark the pins anyway. When I was finally done, I tried putting it together… only then I realized what a doofus I was. But in my defense, did you noticed the date? I had my IPad streaming live the men’s NCAA championship game, so I think I should be forgiven for not paying attention!
The third one is missing a tail… I had to cut it down after I started removing the non-waste side again. The reason? Well, look at the date… I was watching the women’s NCAA this time.
The fourth one looks better in pictures than in person. It is severely out of square, the inside corner (not shown) has some noticeable gaps and it was just too tight and needed too much hammering. Also, see the little nick on the far right tail? Even after marking the waste, I began cutting the tail with the fretsaw. Again! What’s wrong with me? Anyway, I stopped myself earlier this time and corrected, but the nick is there to remind me of the obvious lesson: Pay attention!
For the fifth one, I wanted to experiment how important was to saw “to the line” vs. just splitting the line for the pins (given how tight my previous dovetails where and how much hammering they required). So now I now, it looks worse than the previous one for sure, and is too loose and “gappy”. It went down just with hand pressure. Not horrible; probably could survive with glue; but the point of the dovetail is to have mechanical strength.
That leads me to the sixth and last one so far (last picture, by itself). Much better, but still quite a way from furniture quality. Yet, I am very happy with the progress and can see that eventually I will get there. This one I had to re stablish one tail because it wasn’t square enough (I think I am going to get one of those dovetail squares; I see their usefulness now), but the only reason I did it is because now I can recognize mistakes better and in time. So I call that progress. This one I cut the pins to the line, but not close enough; it still required too much hammering to fit them (ironic, though; I thought with hand tools I could work late while the family sleeps because of the lack of noise, but my hammering woke up my wife sleeping in the second floor. As it is our agreement, I keep my cell on the shop so she can text me to stop if I am making too much noise). There are also some imperfections along the baseline, resulting in gaps. Also, one of the pins wasn’t straight enough, so there is a vertical gap on one of the walls. The biggest improvement I need now is in paring to the baseline and make sure I am truly plumb with the chisel.
So that’s it for now. Sorry for the long winded post, but I hope a rookie perspective will be helpful to other with little skills, just like me.
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Originally Posted by lowell holmes
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