A Comprehensive Guide to Cutting Dovetails - Tips and Tricks Galore

[Music] what's up guys on this week's join of the week I want to do something a little bit different I'm going to tell you everything I know about dovetails every tip trick every little shortcut everything I've learned over the years on how to cut dovetails and in fact I'm doing a dovetail challenge over on Instagram where I'm giving away Allen Nielsen rabbiting block playing some stanley chisels a dovetail saw some jigs and it's gonna be judged I just found this out by Chris over at third coast craftsman I'm so excited he's become a good friend of mine we've got some things in the works that we're gonna be working on together but he's going to be judging it over on Instagram there'll be a link right down here below you can go check out that contest and win this beautiful $400 dovetail prize pack so let's get into the dovetails and the first thing that's really important is that you mill your material it doesn't have to be the same thickness but it does have to be square has to be square and so make sure when you're milling that the two mating faces are square to each other the next step is we're gonna head over the table so I'm going to show you a little trick for hiding the inside of your dovetails so the first step when you're doing dovetails is decide where your pins and tails are going to be so we're just going to label these boards this is going to be T four tails P four pins sometimes when I'm doing a box I'll do PA and TA and TB and PB and that way I know which goes where but one of the things I always like to do if I'm using the same type of wood is I do the grain match so you can see this grain lines up perfectly here now the first thing that I always do when cutting dovetails is I cut a little rabbit into my tails board and what this does it allows you to hide the inside of your tails because sometimes you'll get a little blowout along that line or it won't be that clean so if you do a rabbit not only does it give you a ninety degree reference here but it also can hide the inside of your pins and tails it makes your box look a lot cleaner so we're gonna use our marking gauge here to set the depth of that rabbit and that is always going to be the width of your other board so I all I do is I just put my marking gauge on top of my board here lock it down and then I just check it make sure that it is correct and it is I'm gonna micro adjust it a little bit on the wide side so that way it'll instead of it being proud it'll be the opposite of proud I can't think of that right now so what that means because it's our tale board we're gonna mark all the way around the board and pin board you only mark the face in the rear and now one thing to remember when you do this is that you're marking gauge is going to be different size when you switch because you cut this rabbit you're actually going to decrease the width of where your dovetails are going to go so you need to remember to change your marking gauge when you go to the other board now we need to decide how deep into the board we're gonna go honestly I don't have a formula for this what I do is I just do a little one so I don't know eighth of an inch or so and so because these are our faces I know that this is just gonna go around my board like this and I mark all of these faces that way you can see exactly where it is when you're when you're cutting and creating the rabbet so I'm gonna go ahead and cut this out using a table saw it's best to use a flat bottom blade but I don't have one that sharp right now so we're gonna use our forest blade and then clean it up with a rabbiting plane [Music] [Applause] [Music] so before we get into this let's talk about the tools you need and the tools that are great to have so mandatory to cut dovetails is a dovetail saw a marking gauge a marking knife some sort of mallet a square and some chisels now that will get the job done now here's some tools I think that make it easier obviously a dovetail jig the cat's Moses's dovetail jig specifically skew chisel so chisels that have an angle on them are great for getting into corners again not needed but helpful and then a pair of dividers these dividers help you in marking out but you don't need them you can use a ruler and Mark out your dovetails just evenly spaced or however you want to space them but this is a great way for marking them out let me show you how I use this so the way I use my dividers is I measure the board so we're at just a little over 3 and 3/4 so I'm going to set it to a third of that which is one and a quarter and that's going to give me a thin CH wide pins here in the middle and I walk the dividers along starting at the edge and then go to the other edge walk them along and now that leaves me with two pins and three tails but I haven't accounted for the half pins yet so what I'm going to do take my dividers and set them to 1/8 of an inch by placing my divider right there on my square now a good combo square is going to have indents at all the numbers so I can literally just put my divider right in the indent it sits in there I'm going to set that to eighth of an inch and then I'm going to go from both sides and just make one mark and that's going to be my half pin then I'm going to take my square of my marking gauge and because this is the tailboard we're going to go ahead they're going to be square on the top of the board so we're going to go ahead and just make a mark at all of your little hole locations just gonna place my marking knife right in the hall and then slide my square up to it and there we go now we have those marked out one thing that's very helpful especially when you're beginning is to mark out your waste now we're gonna cut our tails and one thing to think about when you're dovetailing is no matter what kind of saw even a very thin one like this Japanese dovetail saw it's gonna have to set on it which means one tooth is going to be on this side and one tooth is gonna be on this side and they alternate why a marking knife line is so great is you can put one side or the other in your marking knife line I consider my marking knife lines like my neighbors fence I can touch it but you can't go over so what that means is when you go to put your teeth in you don't just put your saw in the line you put the correct side of your saw in the line so you can see here just the left teeth are not in the line if I were to put the left heap in the line and look how big of a difference this makes that's over another 64th of an inch which a 64th of an inch and a dovetail is going to be a big gap so make sure you're cutting with the right side of your teeth so now I like to cut with my show face towards me and I'm going to use the eight to one dovetail jig here because we're doing hardwood so that's my preferred method so when I get my sauce started I put the correct side of the saw in the line and I use my thumb and I hold it sort of at an angle and just do one backward stroke and that just helps me kind of establish where I'm going to cut and then I take my jig sliding it up to it and then I just use consistent strokes have my arm going the same way each time and with my show face towards me I can see when I get down to the line that people are gonna see and then I can check here in the back and we're just perfect right there so now what I'm going to do is cut every line that goes this way and then flip my board around [Applause] [Music] okay one thing I'd like to do this is a great trick when I was first learning and I still use this all the time is I save the fine sawdust from when I was sawing this makes great wood filler in case you do have a little gap when you glue it up you can just spread this in your joint and it's gonna hide anything no one will ever see it now there's a few ways to clear out waste but I like to use a coping saw it's really easy to do this with a chisel but I I always do it if if you're gonna do it the coping saw do with your show side facing you that way you know that you're not over your line in the show side of your box and you very simply go down and try and get as close to your line without going over and the closer you get the easier it's gonna be when you get to your chisel portion just like that same thing over here also little tip don't ever touch your coping saw blade after you do this it gets hot as can be then we're gonna flip our board over and this is a ninety degree cut which you can do by hand or if you have my guide it has a 90 degree side on it so same thing I just start my saw with the teeth in the right place slide my jig up to it and this cut goes faster because you're going across the green so just be careful you don't cut into your other tail and you just snap that off and as you can see I left just a hair of material there just because they can pair that down with the chisel just to make sure we get a perfect match up there I'm gonna go ahead and do my other side and this is another great benefit to the rabbit because now you know exactly where you need to start your saw there's absolutely no guesswork to it because you know exactly where your boards going to line up so you can just put it right against that shoulder there slide your jig up to it and then all we need to do is clean out the waste from our Sun or two pins so when you're chiseling out waste what I like to do is take half and then half again until we get right up to our shoulder one of the great things about having this rabbit is you've got a ninety degree face here that is going to guide you into the right place for your chisel and make sure it's 90 degrees if you don't have that or on the other side of your board you can always your jig by flipping it upside down and using it to pare down I don't use it that often unless I'm on big wide open pins but what I like to do is just and you never go all the way through I do this from both sides and just keep taking half and then when I get down to my shoulder I put it right against the shoulder and just tap down try not to bruise your tails like I just did but that's okay this is the inside this is no one's ever going to see this because of this rabbit we're going to do that on both sides here you can use your fingers as a break so I have my fingers here and my hand against the board and that's going to keep me from tapping all the way through so I'm just gonna get right here in the shoulder and then we're gonna flip our board over and start from this side now this is the critical side because this is your sho side so you don't want to just drop into that line at first because the bevel on your chisel is gonna push it back into the board thus lowering your marking gauge line so you want to take as little as you can now we did a pretty good job with the coping saw here I'm actually gonna get a little bit bigger chisel just get right into my line and just tap down and I'm gonna take a little bit at a time because if you try and take that whole thing at once it's gonna push your chisel back into the middle now one of the things that happens to people if you can see in here is they get a little hump in the middle here so it's always okay to kind of undercut this part so that you're actually down a couple degrees and it'll create like a little concave in there and that'll help your tails fit in so we're gonna finish up clearing up this waist here and because you already did the backside this one should finish it up here so there we go we're not going to worry about the very inside corners here making sure I'm not gonna bruise either in my tails if you can see in here now there's a little bit left against the shoulder of our chisel now there's lots of ways to get that but we're going to clear that out using a skew chisel and then we're gonna scoop out the middle a little bit just to ensure that you have a flat line across and the way to check that is with your square you can just go and make sure that it's touching down on both sides all the way across and you're not getting hung up on anything so I'm gonna put this back in my vise with my show side facing me that way I'm certain not to mess anything up over here and I'm just gonna use my skew chisel to get those corners nice and clean again scooch izzle' not mandatory we're just gonna scoop out the middle just a little bit and that's looking pretty good I'm going to use a little bit of a bigger chisel here to just make sure that we're all the way down and again you can scoop out in here too because no one's ever gonna see the inside so if you're getting hung up in there you don't be afraid to scoop out the middle and then the very last thing to do is your shoulders which I like to do in the vise and when you have a rabbet you can really make sure you can see that you can use the the flat of the rabbet to really make sure that you are down where you need to be there and the most important thing when you're doing this is sharp chisels that if you don't have sharp chisels you might as well not do dovetails because that's what really makes all the difference in the world it really really does so we're going to go ahead and do this shoulder here we have our tails perfect it's time to mark them onto our pins and the first step is we need to set our marking gauge line so we do that by using the width of our tails and remember we cut a rabbet so it's going to be different so I just take this and press it down on my board below and then I'm gonna go ahead and just check that and make sure it's good and again I'm gonna just adjust it just a teeny bit so that I err on the side of too much not too little and then we're gonna go ahead and remember we marked out our board so we're going to keep our grain matte so we're gonna do it on this side here and this one you only need to mark off both faces because you're gonna have wood here still so you don't want to have an ugly line in your in your board so we're just going to Markoff the two phases so as you can see that line ends up being the width of the tails not the width of the board and that's because of that rabbit so now let's mark them out I'm going to show you two ways to do this first is kind of the way that everybody does it if they don't have a dovetail alignment board and they use a hand plane so you set your your board in here at the same depth as your hand plane sits on your bench and lock that in and then you pull your hand plane back and you put your board on top and then people go ahead and they mark their board out so the way a dovetail lie mat board works is it goes in your vise just like this and it's 90 degrees with two coplanar fences and then you take your board that you're marking onto in this case for us it's the pins and you push it make sure it's against your fence in the same height there's a board you're marking out with and then you just lock it into your vise and this makes it super repeatable for you so even if you slip you can move your board back to your fence and get it on there again and then you just take it and using the flat side of your marking knife you mark out against your tails so you have a nice clean line and they don't put too much pressure on these because it's real easy to slip and not get it right and there you go you can see you have that marked out first thing I do before I forget is Mark out my waist so they don't cut on the wrong side of line and you always cut in your waist you're always gonna cut on this side this this this side you always want to be in your waist with your dovetail saw with those two teeth so let's go ahead and start cleaning these up now I'm gonna go ahead and cut my pins I'm gonna put my board in my vise here and my dovetail jig has to pin sides on it so what I like to do is I cut the first three going this way because I'm right-handed and I flip the board around and cut the other three bone the other way and so what I do here is I set my this is our waist side so we need to be on our waist side and one of the great things about using a jig is you can cut right up to the line with a little practice you won't have to chisel out the sides of your pins or tails so I just make sure I'm in my waist side here give my saw just a little a bit of a head start by doing one forward stroke and then I slide my jig right up to it and then I get down to my side on one side and then I get down to the side on the other side and that creates a little hump and a great little trick here is the end of this saw if you tilt it up that's a depth stop so this won't cut but this last tooth will so if you have a little hump in the middle you can just run that through the middle and just double check that everything is perfectly flat in there and then I turned my dovetail jig around start my saw in the waist over here and cut out the rest of our pins [Music] one thing to be careful about when you're chiseling here is that these are obviously at an angle so when you're coming in from your show side make sure that you're coming in also at an angle so you're not messing up your pins and then when you're coming from back here remember that they angle out the other way so just be be very careful but I always do my show side first establish that line and then make sure that I don't go over from my backside but again this is going to be hidden in your rabbit so you can be you can fudge a little bit back here if you need to so let's go ahead and start on our show side [Music] okay so now we got to clean out our corners here just to make sure everything's good you can do that with a regular chisel because tails you got a lot more room we're gonna do it with a skew chisel just because it makes it a little bit easier you can just clean those out and then once we do that we're gonna check it with a square and see if we need to scoop out any of that middle make sure we have no bad humps in the middle so now we're gonna check it with a square here and it looks like I'm missing a couple places on the front so what I'm gonna do just very simply is you can just scoop out the middle and just make sure you don't have any humps and make sure you use your fingers as a brake so you don't go through to the other side and just scoop out that middle and I can see actually a couple places where it's high you can see I missed my line on both of these and that's good you wanna if you're gonna miss missing your waist not in your finished piece so I'm gonna hold this up here and take a look and you can see that both of these are a little big where I missed my line so this is actually really easy to fix just take your dovetail jig here take your widest chisel and just put it right in that marking knife line you want to take as little as possible here but your dovetail jig is going to be the perfect angle so I'm not even going to take that line right now can it just take a little teeny bite at a time I just chop that off and as you can see I got right down to my line here I'm just gonna clean that up a little bit the same thing here and then check your fit it's always better to go slower than faster here oh man that's right about to go what I like to do is kind of press it down and then you can see if you have any like right there you can see it's kind of pushing some of that wood away so that we know that right there is still a little thick this is something I forgot to mention it's also useful is just some files and you want files that don't cut the edges like this one cuts on one edge but not the other so that's the edge I put down towards my board I'm just gonna give it just a little rub here we're so close that I don't want to try and cut it with a chisel because I know I'm gonna go over so I just give it a little rub both sides really just even smoothing out the saw marks okay now we're gonna go ahead trying our fit again I can already tell that's fitting way better I can feel this is proud a little bit over here which means we still need to just this one's good but this one over here is a little proud and so I'm gonna look at two things here one I'm gonna look at whether the pin itself is square and it looks like I might have got a little wonky on that so I'm going to just take my square here and look if you look real close you can see that I got a pretty large slant to that one so what we're gonna do to bring that in square again we're going to take our tail board and stick it in our vise so that it's perfectly level with our pin board just like that I'm gonna lock my vise in and then we're going to use our jig is that chisel guide again and we're not going to cut the top we're just gonna cut the bottom and square that back up a little bit more we're real close now so I don't want to risk it with the chisel there we go starting to look good there let's check this again here hmm and there we go some really good fitting dovetails here okay now we're just gonna put glue and the great thing about dovetails is you just need a little teeny bit and we're actually gonna put some on the outside and use that sawdust trick I was telling you about so I'm really not gonna use that much at all right now now the sawdust trick I was telling you about is great all you do here is you just take glue rub it into every joint then use a wet towel just to wipe it off and then you just take your sawdust that you save from sawing and just rub that into the glue and then when you go to sand it you just give it a light sanding all right and let that dry for about thirty minutes we'll give it a quick cleanup little sanding and then put some lacquer on it and we'll finish this guy up [Music] that came out really good one of the raging debates about dovetails is whether to leave your marking gauge line some people say that they look hand cut some people say they don't like the look but I left them in so you could see what it looks like with the marking gauge lines typically I take them out but I wasn't about to sit here and sand for 10 minutes on a sample piece these came out really good there I can only see one tiny tiny little teeny little gap right here and it's just about a hair length long and it's just because I missed that area with glue use that glue trick I've been using that since my first set of dovetails and it makes you look like a genius even if you're not so hopefully this gives you the confidence to go try the holiday dovetail challenge head over to my Instagram there's a link below 400 dollar prize pack including this Lea Neilson rabbiting block plane you saw me use in the video the stanley chisels you saw me use the dovetail saw you saw me use the jigs you saw me use and head over to my website grab yourself a dovetail alignment board it's really really helpful guys thanks for watching stay safe in the shop and have a wonderful day

Channel: Jonathan Katz-Moses

Views: 331,894

Rating: 4.852169 out of 5

Keywords: dovetails, cutting dovetails, hand cut dovetails, dovetail joint, dovetail, how to cut dovetails, cutting dovetails by hand, dovetail jig, through dovetail, dovetail saw, making dovetails, woodworking, cutting dovetail joints, how to cut dovetails by hand, hand cut dovetail, cut dovetails, hand cutting dove tail joints, handcut dovetails, better dovetails, joinery, making a dovetail, perfectly cut dovetails, magnetic dovetail jig, katz-moses magnetic dovetail jig

Id: qEhHrINwk8w

Length: 25min 4sec (1504 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 06 2018