Hopefully this might be of help to someone learning to cut dovetails. If you have comments or tips on improving dovetails please step on up and add your thoughts.
We buy various amounts of alder mill ends to burn for heat during the winter. Some of it just seems like it should become something other than heat. Since my surgery a year ago my prescription medications have been kept in a cardboard shoe box. It is starting to fall apart.
The piece held in the vise has already had a few passes from a plane before this picture was taken. The other two pieces have already been planed.
a Start Here.jpg
All of these pieces were marked to be resawn:
b Resaw Mark.jpg
This piece is being sawn for the bottom and possibly a top, haven’t decided yet. The carpenter pencil is sharpened carefully with a chisel to a very fine edge so it will follow in the wheel gauge’s track. This helps on the band saw.
Of course after resawing there is more planing:
c More Planing.jpg
Low light with a long exposure makes it look like more effort is being expended than what was really going on. The piece marked 9/32 is a gauge used here for setting the Tite-Mark® gauge for marking the resawing of this piece. This particular gauge has a handle/fence because it was made as a spacer between slats on chairs tables and potting benches. Over the years as they are needed many of these have been made. The ones without handles are usually made so that they are 3/8” X 3/4” or 1/2” X 1”. That makes it easy to identify them with just a number on the end like a 1 or a 3. They come in handy for setting the fence on a combination or rebate plane.
Here a groove is being cut:
d Grooving.jpg
The plane is a Stanley #50. The early versions of this plane do not have a blade adjuster. There are other ways to attach a bottom to a drawer or a box. My preferred is to plow a slot. With a through slot and through dovetails there will be a hole in the ends. There may be an easy fix for this.
Before the joinery begins it is important to have your pieces square and sized accurately. This is where the shooting board excels:
f Shoot.jpg
Alder is technically a hardwood but in reality it is likely softer than many varieties of fir. A sharp blade will cut end grain without any problems. Many years ago, before my sharpening got up to speed, dust from shaving end grain seemed normal.
Over the years my dovetails have improved considerably. Today I had a dovetail epiphany as to why cutting tails first works better for me. Cutting square vertically is usually easy for me. Cutting square across is a bit more of a challenge. So cutting the tails first allows me to correct any out of square cuts before marking the pins.
Bending over is hard on the back. One of my solutions is sitting on a bucket:
e Bucket Seat.jpg
It is made from a scrap piece of 2 X 6 with curved rabbets on the bottom ends. It is much better than bending over when marking dovetails.
Here is the link to the Bucket Seat build:
http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthre...04-Bucket-Seat
Most of the time my dovetail layout is done by first laying out a story stick. This time it was done using a pair of dividers directly on the workpiece. Heck enough dividers seduce me into bringing them home with me they may as well be put to work:
g Layout.jpg
The visible from the outside plowed slot will be in the pins. It can be a hassle with thin wood in the tails. My decision was to use the narrow end of the half pin as my reference size. The tops of the tails were made twice the size of the half pins and the full pins would also be larger. Well they say the best laid plans of mice and men often go agackly.
h Half Pin Marked.jpg
Here the two tail boards are carefully clamped together to gang cut the tails. Over time a lot of lessons have been learned. One of them improved my work tremendously. It is to set the knife to the mark and then bring the square to the knife. This has helped me do much better layout leading to better work.
That is the picture limit for one post so this will be continued later.
jtk