Toward a philosophy of joinery.

[Kees Heiden]

I will make an objection to the over-cutting. The goal of joinery is to provide integrity.

The dovetail holds due to an interlocking fit between tails and pins, everyone knows this. The dovetail joint loses its ability to resist pulling apart if you severe the ties between socket and pin. The pins are now reliant upon their connection between the top of the pin and the socket, which in a pin is the thinnest part.

IMO, it needlessly weakens the joint, and increases its reliance upon the glue connection between the pin and tail.

We see surviving examples, what we don't see are examples that broke in use and were either replaced or discarded.

When cutting the pin, the overcutting is usually minimal, just enough to release the fibers in the corner. You mostly see these very long overcuts in the socket, where there is plenty of wood around to keep up the integrity of the piece.

Those guys may have been "sloppy", they sure weren't stupid.

And I don't think we can draw any conclusion from the fact that the majority of antique furniture didn't survive. The most important factor was changing fashion.

[Brian Holcombe]

By pin I mean the wood that separates the sockets. I draw no assumptions WRT their logic, but do attempt to look at things from my own perspective.

This approach my work fine for drawer fronts, but I dovetails are used structurally in casework, removing a great deal of their integrity might not fare well in that case.

[Kees Heiden]

Yes of course, I am always a bit at a loss when talking about pins, tails, sockets...


When we refer to the picture at the top of the previous page, I don't see a whole lot of decrease in strength due to the overcuts. I suspect it is all still waaaaaay strong enough.The pins are still firmly attached to the uncut wood at the outside side of the cabinet.

[Malcolm McLeod]

I don't think this is evidence of poor craftsmanship. ...... Being able to understand when these methods were typically used and the pieces they be found on should be of greater importance than dismissing the work as "sloppy" or taking "shortcuts".

I would agree, especially if you include context. What is the intended purpose of the 'craftsmanship' displayed in the pic? ...Is it fit-for-purpose? Is it for a drawer in a buffet in a grand formal dining room? Or, is it for a junk drawer in a work table in a basement store room? Will it hold gold bullion? Or be a catch-all bin for worn out feather dusters?

Without context, can anyone judge if it is good craftsmanship? ...Lousy for a buffet, but overkill for a junk drawer. Judge if you must.

[michael langman]

For no understandable reason, I was born a perfectionist!
I just got done putting down red oak flooring in the hall and one bedroom.
When I walk down the hall, 99% of the time, my eye is looking at that gap between the molding and the floor line. Too much of a gap for my mind to let go of.
But as I get older, I tend to let go of those imperfect things, because I am realizing that I am missing the broader picture of how beautiful things really are around me.
My wife told me a long time ago, that, "We don't live in a perfect world." So that is why she married me!

I bought a hard maple chest on chest dresser for my bed room. The dovetails in the top two drawers are filled in with a white gluish filler. When my brother in law saw that he replied that the dresser was not of a high quality, or was worth less then a dresser without those imperfections.
Being a tool maker who has worked in the shops for years doing high precision work, where things had to be right, I see those dovetails through the eyes of the person that made them. Maybe an older gentleman whose eyes were no like those of a young man. Or maybe his wife, or father or mother had just died, and his mind was not on his work. Or he was working sick, because he could not afford to be home.
So it goes, I suppose.

[Chris M Pyle]

Overcutting a half blind dovetail like that used to be a pretty common technique. It can be enhanced a bit by not just overcutting but also really digging the tip of the saw into the wood. What remains then in the corner is just a few stray fibers that are easilly cut away with a sharp pointy knife.

I describe the process with some pictures overhere: http://seekelot.blogspot.nl/2015/06/...ovetaling.html

I find myself drawn more and more to these kinds of techniques. I am absolutely not interested in perfectness anymore. Boring to my eye. And when the piece is put into use, I really like it when it gets a worn and scruffy look as soon as possible.

I can appreciate patina but I don't understand the urge to have something look used. A well-designed piece should look good as it ages.

Undercutting looks terribly sloppy/ugly to me. The beauty of our lives: each of us is drawn to something. Some like the decaying, used or decrepit look.

On the other hand, well designed/executed furniture is a thing of beauty to me. The clean surface, the tight fit, the hours of design and fitting are what I find most interesting.

Shaker furniture is cute but Ming dynasty chairs or tables are absolutely breathtaking, perhaps because I appreciate what went into making them as much as the form itself.

Each item can be appreciated for what it is: some are utilitarian, some are production designs intended to be built economically, some are meant to stand at the top in design and execution.

Each has a place but the reason Michaelangelo's name lives on and others have faded is because he sought perfection over everything else. The pursuit of perfection in any field is the most beautiful thing to me.

[Pat Barry]

When you want to work more along ancient workmethods, then it becomes the "correct" method. .

It may be that the most ancient of methods involved the chisel only and not saw cutting of the sockets. In this case, there would be no marks of this sort. Who knows what came first?

[Stewie Simpson]

There is another alternate approach to cutting single lap dovetail joints, as you will note from 31.20 onwards in the following video;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYYyrNR3700

[Kees Heiden]

It may be that the most ancient of methods involved the chisel only and not saw cutting of the sockets. In this case, there would be no marks of this sort. Who knows what came first?

Probably not, the egyptians had saws allready. And very early furniture relied much more on mortise and tenon construction.

[Warren Mickley]

When we look at drawer dovetails that have failed they tend to fall into these categories:
1) Thin pins and or thin half pins at the top or bottom.
2) Extreme angles on the dovetails, like 15 - 35 degrees.
3) Machine dovetails: rolling out of rounded sockets.

When we look at old work with overcuts in the back of a drawer front, we don't see failure. Part of the reason is that we are weakening the wood in a direction that was already weak. Avoiding the longer cuts adds very little strength.

The idea that there was some golden age when dovetails were made without saws is something Todd Hughes would have called "interesting".

[Pat Barry]

Probably not, the egyptians had saws allready. And very early furniture relied much more on mortise and tenon construction.

It would be very interesting to find out that a saw came before a chisel since a saw is obviously a much more elaborate tool than a chisel. Are you just guessing?

[James W Glenn]

Extrapolated guess: Chisels need a more "advanced" Metallurgy to produce. Saws can be made of much "softer" metal as can axes and adzes with a convex blade geometry.

[Stanley Covington]

Extrapolated guess: Chisels need a more "advanced" Metallurgy to produce. Saws can be made of much "softer" metal as can axes and adzes with a convex blade geometry.

Disagree. Forging a sawplate of any significant size is much more difficult than making a chisel, whether the materials are copper, bronze, iron, or steel. A chisel can be made, and the archaeologists tell us they were routinely made, from stone.

[James W Glenn]

Saws are found in the copper age.

http://www.wikiwand.com/en/History_of_construction

Quick googling shows chisels existed in the copper age. I do not think that with copper as a material a very steep bevel or a flat "back" of the chisel would be possible, so I will add Chisels with a "modern geometry" to my hypothesis. Lithic Stone tools may well have been produced as a wood chisel and if made for "fine wood working of the day" and made to do paring cuts and such. The same technology could also produce a long thin serrated blade used to "Saw" thru materials. Neolithic technology showed further refinement of tools. With out spending the day freshening up on my archaeology, I am confident that chisels and saws could and were made of bone and sea shells. Today a cold chisel and a paring chisel are both called a chisel. The general description "Hand held Wedge" seems inclusive enough. A saw is a much narrower description. A chisel does not necessarily "chisel" but a saw "saws"

[James W Glenn]

I know that this started as a "Form or Function" discussion of dovetailing, but when I think of a "Philosophy of Joinery" the first thing the comes to mind is

"Chain saw to cabinet scraper, with as few steps as possible between" This is an adaptation of my Boat building philosophy which is "Chain saw to block plane"

Which is an oversimplification, as the jack or hand planer always gets used.

When it comes to producing functional "workman like" work especially at an sort of production level with hand tools, I don't reduce the standards of work I am attempting to produce, but accept the element of risk that some percentage of the multitude of individual operations involved will not be "perfect".

If the joinery needs to functionally or visually "perfect" I will do whatever I can to control that risk.

Most importantly, I do not want any of the work I produce to suggest that My "Give a Damn" is broken.