Chisel techniques for hand cut dovetails

I'd like to say show you some chisel techniques I use when I cut dovetails by hand the first thing we need to look at other chisels themselves this is a nice run-of-the-mill Japanese chisel but you can see from here that I've modified this I've ground away the sides to leave nice sharp corners so that when we go into the corners of the dovetails then when we we don't bruise the corners most Japanese chisels come with quite a flat edge on them here the other thing I've done with the chisels is to grind the main bevel away here I've grown the highway at 20 degrees now the advantage of that is when you when you're chiseling chopping down into the wood to remove the waste the steeper the angle of the bevel the more pressure there is wedging action that's going to be causing the chisel to go that way and I still sharpen the the final tip at the thirty degree angle which is my favorite now that's a fair amount of trouble to go to and you do have to be careful as well because you can easily end up going too far making itches or sure less across here then it started and that's not good either thankfully manufacturers have cottoned onto two requirements in dovetailing and here's a chisel from blue spruce which has got lovely sides which come to a virtual sharp edge there and it's really nicely made and these are excellent chisels for dovetailing but quite expensive and another chisel here from ashley isles is similar they've ground it down very nicely at the side not quite so fine as the blue true blue spruce chisel but it's nice hard tool steel and these are about a third of the price so these would make a very good choice for dovetailing before we get onto any chiseling techniques the more you can actually remove with your saw the less they'll be to chisel and so it's a good idea when you're cutting your dovetails just to take a little bit of time to try and get the saw to go right down to the line put my glasses on so you'll notice there that I slowed down as I came to the end of the cut and also had a little look on the back side of the cut as well and this is just to make sure it goes all the way down to the line but it doesn't go past the line and it's well worth taking the time to do this we'll just do the other side [Laughter] okay and so there we have it there's the dovetails cut down to the line and I will reduce the amount of paring and chiseling while keeping the lines nice and straight and all the way down to the bottom when it comes to removing the waste from in between the dovetails again the closer you can go down to the marking line here the better a fine saw here by new concepts and this saw when you point it straight it saw straight and it's a lovely sort to use so this allows you to get down the curve and get extremely close to the line and the treatment of the sides is much the same take the hand saw and then using your using your thumb to position that there your thumb nail you can come really close to the line and just get it down there and the same on the other side and so there we have it so before we start doing any chiseling at all we've got lovely straight cuts that go all the way down to the line and we've got the absolute minimum there of waste to remove with our chisels and that's an important thing that's often overlooked now it's time to start using the chisels so I'm using these chisels by blue spruce and on looking at the lines there's one or two here that just needs to be extended downwards so a little technique I use is to slide it down the dovetail and then just rock it into the corner like that and that just makes sure that they end up nice and crisp now with the chopping out where I've got a little bit more waste to take out here then I need to do an initial chopping cut and I'd like to show you the angles that I use on that so one of the things that happens is when we chisel down is that if you're too close to the line then the chisel gets pushed across and it can squash the knife line and that can end up as an ugly gap when the joints assembled so I like to take the chisel here and then we've got 90 degrees there and I just like to tilt that away and this is for the initial removing of the waste so tap it away and there you can see the actual knife line has still been maintained but we're close enough now to put the chisel in so if you put that chisel in there and I like to just put the tip of the chisel right into the corner there the old fashioned way of using what using a chisel the same size as the dovetails I don't like that I like to do it in two cuts and go right into the corner so here we just drop that into the knife line now the first little tap I like to do is there at 90 degrees tap and then in order to protect the line as the chisel Goes Down and the wedging action takes over I then like to tilt that to 92 degrees and then on the other side drop it into the corner tap 92 degrees and there you can see it's come out cleanly and sharply and right into the corner and if we do that on the other side then it leaves the the minimum amount of waste to clean up now on the edges we've sorne down very close to the line here and I'd like to show you another technique I use I call this one seeing 90 degrees because on this end here we've got a scribe line up there a scribe line across the end and one round there and the typical method of doing that is to cease to sort of chisel slowly away in from each side but I've got a method which is actually more accurate and it's certainly a lot faster it's to drop the chisel into the knife line there and actually see 90 degrees initially if you don't trust your eye you can use a little square to make sure that the chisels they're at 90 degrees but it's amazing when you actually practice this how well your eye can see it so with the chisel in there line that up 90 degrees just line up the 90 degrees after each tap and then here and now we have it the end chiseled out cleanly dead to the line all the way around and no fiddling so if we repeat all this then we'll have the tailboard done and ready to go the tales have been cleanly chiseled out and we use the same principle to do that with the pins as well now one of the things you can come across is if you've made your cut just a little bit too far away from the knife line there then the joint won't actually go together and you may think you could just take a wide chisel here and put it in there and just cut straight down there but this is asking for trouble and you're very very unlikely to end up with a straight pin on this side and it could easily cause split out as well so the traditional method is to pare away and it requires quite a lot of skill and quite a lot of practice in order to do that because it's very easy to go too far so I'd like to show you a method which is quicker and more consistent for removing this back to the line so the first thing we do is to take a chisel that's wider here than the pins drop that into the knife line and then just give it a tap but we're only gonna go down here about an eighth of an inch and then once you've done that here you can see the initial start of the cut and then you can take a small chisel take your knife and you can not small chisel small square I meant to say and you can take your knife and extend that line down to the base line just extend that down to the baseline and then again with a chisel that's a little bit larger you can drop that in there and just give at the angle of that another tap at the bench and so what that's done then is it's taken the two lines that you know your that you know are going to fit perfectly and it's protected those lines and now once you've done that then it makes the job of paring away the waste much easier and much safer and so there as you can see everything's been pared away and we've got a really crisp line on top there and we've got a really crisp line down there so using the same method to deal with the second pin we can now knock the joint together and there you have it nice crisp clean dovetails with the minimum of fuss I hope you've enjoyed watching this techniques and that they'll have helped you with your dovetailing thank you for watching

Channel: DavidBarronFurniture

Views: 122,909

Rating: 4.9346695 out of 5

Keywords: David Barron, cabinet making, wood working, Woodworking, Chisel techniques, hand cut dovetails

Id: ppBwAd7pouU

Length: 13min 4sec (784 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 27 2013