5 Tips to INSTANTLY Improve your DOVETAILS

hello everyone in this video we're going to be going over five tips to instantly improve your dovetails now it's worth saying this is not a replacement video for my video on how to cut a through dovetail or house cuts a lapse of tail it's just going to summarize a few of the points in that video plus a little more so what would suggest is watch those first get the technique get the whole process sorted out and then you can come back here for reference on a few extra tips that are going to help you out so the first tip that I'm going to show you is the I've forgotten the invisible base line method which as far as I'm aware is something that was used by Allen Peters basically what this allows you to do is clean up the marking gauge lines at the end of dovetailing as easy as possible because they're not actually there in the first place so let me show you that now alright so the invisible base line method what we're gonna do is get our two components that are due to be nested together and instead of setting the marking gauge to a thickness of one component and scratching all the way around to the corresponding component what we're gonna do is mark the width of it on with a pencil first so I'm going to get the thickness of this one I'm going to put it up so it's flush against the end grain on the bottom here so that shows how much it needs to be inset and draw a line along there and on the opposite side as well doesn't need to be too accurate but it needs to be accurate enough if that gives you any sort of tolerance to work too so Drule that on both sides of the components and then you can clamp your tail board up in the voice and work out the spacing for the dovetails so on their sides now I'm just going to do it roughly on sleeve for the sake of time there you go so mark our dovetails on there square across the end very nice and square and down to that pencil line that we've drawn on there just now okay and then just mark our waist and then all you've got to do is get your marking gauge set that to the thickness of your pin board on here so the pencil line was kind of accurate this is what is going to be our accurate one so marking gauge is set to the thickness of the pin board and then you can take that out of the vise and because you've already got your dovetails marks out you've only got a scratch in those waist areas and obviously because this you can make these marking gauge lines nice and deep so it's very easy to register your chisel into you haven't got to worry about removing them later so the edge obviously we're going to remove that it's all fine and the inside face you can mark this out the same as we've done here if you want but it's the inside face doesn't matter there's a scratch all the way along that as well and obviously the other edge as well and that's pretty much all there is to the invisible baseline so obviously when it comes to chopping out that waste your chisels going to be able to go into that line that you scratched with the marking gauge but you're not going to have any marking gauge scratched on the tails that are going to be left over at the end so this is going to be great for drawers for example where maybe you cut that marking gauge line too deep you want to plane it out but then by the time you're playing it out you've made that draw too small to fit into a cavity use the invisible base line method and that will help you a great deal now the tech and check the Tekken's technique the second technique I'm going to be showing you is gang cutting the old gang cutting is is clamping to bits of material that the Jews weave dovetailed in the vise at the same time so you cut two sets of tails at once and this has three main advantages the first one being it makes it a lot easier to cut square across the endgrain the second being it makes the process of dovetailing a little bit quicker and thirdly it allows more consistency between your components so if you cut these at the same time and then split them either side of the draw for example then your tails are exactly the same on either side so let me show you that now so here you go here's our two components that are due to be nested together so on this I've done the pencil line down the bottom so we can still mix in the invisible baseline technique if we wanted so get them clamped in the vise the same height and make sure the edges are perfectly flush so don't only check at the top but also check at the bottom as well because you don't want this to be twisted in here so there we go that's nice now now do the same spacing as before whatever that was and then draw the dovetails across the endgrain and down this front component and there we go so now when it comes to cutting out this component if these were thinner it makes it a little bit more difficult to work out if your square is on the end grain a way of doing it is you can look at the reflection of the sort and if it looks like the material is going straight through the saw in a complete line then it's obviously pretty square if you crank it off like this you can see that the reflection is angled like that but I don't know maybe your saw isn't as shiny as this one so by having this longer reference line on there it means that it's a lot easier to get that source square across the Engram and then you go so you can imagine if I cut all those out they're gonna be exactly the same size you can have a much better chance of that angering being square and it's made the process quicker as well and there you go so that is gang cutting now one thing to look out for when you're doing this obviously you're doubling the material thickness so like I said this is very good for thin components but if the material is as thick as what I'm demonstrating on here you have to be careful when soaring because it's gonna be a lot more difficult to soar through and if your techniques a little bit ropey should be safe then you're gonna struggle quite a lot with getting it accurate while cutting through this thickness so if you're not entirely sure in your soaring technique maybe have a look at my video on how to sort the link of it in the top corner now because that will help you with cutting various joints out especially dovetails so the next tip I'm going to share with you is using a dovetail guide let me just get it out like a banana okay so dovetail guides we have two makes here this one is by David baron and these two here are from Jonathan Katz Moses and these come in various angles so this one is a one in six and we have a one in six here and a one in eight ratio and what these allow you to do is like I said with gang cutting the most important thing about dovetailing is cutting square across the endgrain the angle of the dovetail itself not massively important within reason obviously you don't have being too steep because that makes the corners too fragile and too shallow you might as well just cut a finger joint if you want to know a bit more about dovetail ratios I did a video on that so maybe have a look at that first but what these are lays do is cut perfectly square across the end grain and also get that angle of them spot-on so you have nice consistency across all of your pieces so the way it works is clamp your tail brought up in the vise like this and what you can do is grab the guide and this has a little magnet on the side like this so you can put that up against the mark on your components and the saw it's going to hit that magnet and stay perfectly square across the end grain and it's also going to be guided down the cuts at the perfect ratio so let's just scratch a baseline on there to work too so you go it makes the process nice and easy so let's get the cat smooth this one here so Afghans inside the tail this all gets held in place and voila perfectly square across the end grain and a perfect angled cut now if you want to cut the left-hand side of the tails you can simply flip the jig around and if you're ambidextrous like me you can work from the other side like this and saw with your left hand or alternatively just flip it round in the place like that and you can still use your dominant hand to cut down those tails and then voila a perfectly square cuts across they're perfectly angled down the front you have nice consistent dovetails now you're probably saying at this point we'll ask great Matt but that's only half a dovetail joint what about the pin side of it but you can do with your pins marked out in the end grain so I'll draw them on here just so you can see them a little bit easier so instead of holding the jig like this and soaring down it on that face you can simply flip it round like that and slide it up against your knife line so there you go it's holding it at the exact angle that I sawed it out when I was soaring the tails but now let's flip around the other way and it's going to be sure a perfect joint so you go ask the David baron one and the Jonathan Katz Moses worm you just use one of the four faces on the bottom up against the side flip it round you can work on the other one then obviously it's the same thing as the tails if you ambidextrous you could work on that outside face with either the jigs or you could just simply flip it round if that makes it a little bit easier for you or alternatively just hold the dovetail jig on the back like that and you've still got that angle so there we go that's dovetail guides and like I say these are great for beginners like you can literally never cut a dovetail before pick up one of these and you'll be able to get one perfect straight off the saw it's not cheating it's just a different method of doing so so don't be conscious of that they're still hang-up dovetails so if you want to know a little bit more about the difference between these two guides I did a tall jewel comparing the David baron guide and the cats Moses guide link to that is up there if you want to watch that and let's move on to the next tip which is the V groove on the back of the component and what this allows you to do is make the process of transferring the tails onto the pinboard a lot easier and a lot more repeatable and accurate so let me show you that now so some of you may have seen the technique where you cut a rabbet or a rebate on the back of the tails and then that allows you to slide it up against the pinboard and it kind of locks it in place and that is a great technique but it relies on you having a shoulder plane a rebate plane or something like that and not all of us have that obviously so what you can do you remember at the start in the invisible baseline technique I said that you could still scratch the marking gauge line across the back of the tails on the front here you don't need to do that but on the back you can scratch it all the way along so when it comes to scratching that marking gauge line along the back make it pretty deep because then what you can do is get a chisel and come in from the tail side and then starting a few millimeters back angling up and wiggle it down to hit that marking gauge line what this is doing is creating a little V groove that's angled down on the tail side and then it's hitting a vertical wall on the shoulder line and you notice I'm holding the chisel down the bottom here I'm not holding it up the top like this because if I slip there and that's gonna probably chop the thumb off to hold it down the bottom and then just do little Wiggles make sure that it's nice and sharp and cut a little V groove on the back of your tails and there we go so then what you can do is get your pin board in the vise so we're gonna clamp this with the face side outs get a component behind it and we're going to make it so that the pin board here is sitting about a millimeter above that component behind clamp it in place and then you'll see when we get this pin board on there you see it's getting a positive lock on that shoulder line there so then what I can do is pop a chisel on the face edge here and then I can use that as my alignment and then slide this up until it hits that little B group and that is holding it spot-on in place it's great if you're doing a really wide component or something like that that you're dovetailing maybe you get half way along it and it slips it is a nightmare to try and realign whereas with this method with that little V groove on the back you know that all you've got to do is put your chisel on the edge like that slide it up to hit the V groove and you've got it in exactly the same position as before obviously you don't want it to slip in the first place because you are going to still lose a little bit of accuracy with doing this but it's going to give you the best possible chances of getting it in the same place again then trace around that as normal nice and easy and voila there is the pins cut out and you're not having to affect the thickness of the tails or anything like that by cutting a rabbet in the back it's all exactly the same thickness you've just taken a little notch out at the bottom here to help you with that location there that's a little technique that I use every single time I am dovetailing without fail it makes the transferring process like completely foolproof because that is generally where a lot of the inaccuracies live with badly cut dovetails it's that transfer between the tails and the pins that throws a lot of people off so if you're gonna take any tip from this take that one because I guarantee that is going to instantly improve as the title says your dovetails now the fifth and final technique is actually a technique that I used while cutting the houndstooth dovetails on the corner of my bench gears and I didn't make a big deal of it in the videos but it's something that I'd like to share with you and it is to do with sharpening do not leave I guarantee you it is not going to be me lecturing you about using sharp tools or anything like that because don't worry I am on your side here I hate sharpening as much as you I will try and avoid it as much as possible this is a more economical should we say we're sharpening so you don't have to do it as often yeah it's going to allow you to enjoy the results of the sharp edge on all of your dovetails depending on how many you do anyway let me show you so we've got all of these dovetails here that have been rough cut out while I've been filming this video and the stage open left out is obviously we've sought out the tails and we have cut across the shoulder line with a coping saw we just need to chisel down to it now now what you do is maybe grab this component and if you watched my video on how to dovetail you'll take away half the material left and essentially get as close to that shoulder line as you can before putting your chisel into the shoulder line then that's going to give you a really really nice crisp shoulder line and there's going to be no gaps whatsoever in it so you'll do this component all the way around all four sides of it and it's nice and accurate then you'll go to the second component you'll do exactly the same on all four sides you'll get it right down to that shoulder line and so on until the end now if you sharpen your chisel at the start of the dovetailing it's gonna be lovely on this one but obviously the chisel is deteriorating by the time we get to this one so when you're chiseling down to the shoulder lines on here it's obviously not gonna be as good as this first one especially if you're working on a harder material like oak or ash or something like that poplar or tulip wood whatever you want to call it is pretty forgiving so it's not gonna dig up this edge as much but the same thing applies if I was doing maybe 20 of these by the time he gets the end there is no doubt this is gonna be horrible that one's gonna be pretty good so if I'm doing loads of dovetails or like I said the houndstooth dovetail in this case what I'll do is instead of perfecting all of the components I will sharpen a chisel first and I'll take all of the waste round on all four sides down to half a millimeter to the shoulder line I'm not gonna go in the shoulder line just half a millimeter away this chisels nice and shot let's do that now right so now what I've done is got all of these shoulder lines to within a half a millimeter of the actual shoulder line so I've still got a little bit of material to move but it is literally the case of one chop from either side so now I've removed all of the rough material I've done all of the tasks that are going to be the most brutal on this edge now what I can do is go and sharpen this get a nice fresh edge on it and go down to the shoulder lines on all of these components just by doing one little tap on each side and that's going to give the results of a nice sharp edge on all of these components as opposed to starting on one of them getting it all perfect and watch it deteriorate as it goes from what's it on your side left to right obviously there is gonna be some sort of deterioration as you go along but as long as you're using a good quality chisel or not some like to know Alvie chisel or controversial you know you get the idea and obviously that technique isn't just limited to the tail part of the dovetails you can also do it on the pins as well it is very very useful to do when cleaning out the sockets on the lats dovetails because when you start paring back to those nice knife lines the last thing you want is for AB lunches or to start tearing out the timber and create all sorts of atrocities on there so anyway there you go that is 5 tips to improve your story to instantly improve your dovetails I really hope it helps you out and obviously if you liked the video please do not forget to like the video below it will help me a great deal thank you very much see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Matt Estlea

Views: 119,511

Keywords: how to improve dovetails, how to cut dovetails by hand, cutting dovetails by hand, hand cut dovetails, dovetails, woodworking joints, katz moses, david barron guide, woodworking tips, beginner woodwork, woodworking projects, woodwork, wood, rycotewood, matt estlea, better dovetails, quicker dovetails, dovetail tips, lapped dovetail, through dovetail, houndstooth dovetail, dovetail ratios, dovetail angles, how to cut dovetails, handmade, diy, build, craft, estlea

Id: a-Bs1o0Tmow

Length: 15min 11sec (911 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 14 2018