Dovetail Jig for the Table Saw // Woodworking Joinery

I made a dovetail jig for the table saw for my next project I'm going to be making some drawers with dovetail joinery this is something that's totally new to me I have never done dovetails before but I kept seeing this jig for the table saw that looked really cool and I really wanted to try it so I could not find any videos on anybody making it I just saw a bunch of pictures I saw videos and people using it but not making it so I kind of just had to wing it so if you want to see me figure it out keep on watching I used half-inch MDF for most of the pieces on this jig and I'm going to have a cut list on my website that's going to break down all the different parts of this jig so I started off by just breaking down all the pieces to what I thought would be good for my purposes since all of these pieces look the same it was important to label all the parts that I knew what was what it was at this point that I needed to decide what angle I was going to make the dovetails I settled on a happy medium of 8 degrees the ramp for the tails is 28 inches long by 2 inches wide so to get that 8 degree angle I marked it at it's halfway point which is 14 inches then took a straightedge from the corner to that 14 inch line and this is double a one-in-seven ratio because it's 2 to 14 so it creates about an 8 degree angle the reason why I mark the angles now is because I'm going to be gluing these two pieces up and I wanted to use a brad nail to prevent any slippage during the clamping and I wanted to make sure I wasn't putting any breads in my cut line while that was drying I cut up some more MDF into four inch wide pieces and these are going to act as like the brackets that are in the back holding up the fences of the jig so I set my stop block to 4 inches so that I have perfect squares and then I needed to cut these into triangles so I used my taper jig and I couldn't set it to a full 45 so I just cut off a scrap piece at the miter saw at 45 and use that as a clamp in a stop lock and then I had two perfect triangles the tail ramp is all dry and it's time to cut it so I'm going to use the taper jig again and I already have those lines marked on there that I did previously all you have to do is line up the cut line onto the bottom of the jig and then just clamp that into place so since I had to take away the stop lock on the back of my jig here because I'm being we cutting all the way to the corner I just set my Square to that distance so that I knew how to repeat the cut on the other side so I just did one cut flip the piece over make sure is in the same position using my square clamped it down and then I could just cut the other side making this tail ramp was actually the most difficult part of this jig the rest was smooth sailing I had the pin fence and I just cut it in half and then I set the angle of the miter saw to about 8 degrees didn't really matter if it was perfect to just chop off those ends so that they would meet up in the middle now all of my pieces are cut aside and it's ready to assemble before assembling though I took the base pieces and I marked out where the blade was going to hit on the jig this jig is going to ride in both miter slots so I needed to mark the blade on both sides of the jig and then I brought all those marks up onto the rest of the pieces so that I would not put any Brad nails in any of those locations the first part of the assembly that I did was to put on the braces that are gonna keep it at a perfect 90 degrees so I put some glue on there and made sure that everything was perfectly square and then I locked it down with Brad nails through the front I did that on the pin fence and then I repeated the same process on the tail fence making sure that I wasn't putting any Brad's where I put the marks for where the saw blade was going to hit on the jig to set that aside so the glue could dry a little bit and then I started working on the runners so in the past I have used this HDPE plastic runners for all of my sleds and it's worked out really great so I decided to use it for this as well but you'll see in a bit that it didn't really work out so well my first shot I actually got a perfect thickness and I thought it was going to work great so I marked out the hole locations on the piece of HDPE and I drilled a hole that was wide enough that the screw was going to go in all the way so it won't expand the plastic and then I used a countersink bit so that the screws would sit flush so then I used a VIX bit and I had drilled one hole and then I put one screw into place and then making sure that everything was really square I drilled the second hole and put the other screw into place so I've had a lot of success with using HTTP as runners be or so I'm not sure what the problem was but you can see that it was super bendy and the jig was moving from side to side I think maybe it was the quality of this one or maybe it's because the jig was so short and there wasn't a lot of surface area for it to connect to so I swapped it out to this oak one and then we were good to go so I decided to assemble the pin jig first but I used the tail ramp as a guide as to where to put the pin fence this way it really didn't matter what angles I cut on that tail ramp as long as the angle on the pin fence is installed in exactly the same angle the joint will go together nicely and of course you can't have a glue up without freaking out in some sort of way so I've glued that all this on and I got it all really even with the lines and I actually used the cut offs from the taper jig also to make sure that it was fully in the right angle and then after I got everything into place I realized that there was no easy way for me to clamp any of this down so I quickly took it all off off camera and I used some super glue some CA glue along with the regular wood glue to act as a clamp and then that work totally fine and now the tail jig is way easier to assemble all you have to make sure is that the front of that ramp is flush with the front of the jig and to make sure that everything is nice and square so I put glue everywhere and I did the whole super glue method also I also used some Brad nails to hold everything together and once everything was set up a little bit I flipped everything over onto the other side and I Brad nailed everything from underneath as well one last step was to add a little safety feature so I ran the jigs through the miter slots just to create a soft curve so I know where the bleed is going to go and then I cut up some two by fours to act as a blade guard so the ones that are on the pin fence I actually cut an eighth degree angle on one of the ends so that when the saw blade is coming out it's coming straight through the 2x4 and it's not crooked along with the angle of the fence the tail offence I just cut regular two by fours so I just clamp that into place let it dry and it's done so the jig is done you could see it in the background over there and now it's time to put some layout lines on your pieces of wood so anytime I watched a video on people doing dovetails I see them taking some furs and going across the wood to figure out the layout for their dovetails and there is a zero explanation and not to how they got that measurement so I'm just gonna try to wing it here and figure it out okay so the first thing to do is label your piece this is going to be facing out this is going to be showing so I marked it out I'm going to be marking the pins first and I know that there's a huge debate on whether to do pins or tails first I think what this jig pins are easier so I'm gonna come in a quarter inch from the ends and just make a mark now I don't have a set of dividers to divide this up evenly so I'm just going to try to do it as best as I can between these two pin marks that I made I have three inches to work with so I don't really want to put too much thought into this I'm just gonna try to make it it's even as possible so actually if it's not perfect it's totally fine you can make them as big and small and space them as much as you want it actually looks more hand-cut that way even though this is going to be machine cut so just waiting around the one inch mark I'm gonna go a quarter inch around it and the two inch mark I'm gonna go a quarter inch around that so that was just easy to do even though these aren't going to be perfectly even this middle one's gonna be a little bit smaller I could do the math to figure that out but it really doesn't make a difference now I just take the net meeting piece line it up make a mark and that's how high you're gonna set your table saw blade so you don't need to bring these marks all the way up because you're just gonna have the table saw set to that depth the only thing you need to do is Mark out your waist so you want to make sure that you're always cutting on the waist side of your line all right let's take it over to the table saw okay so now this is the pin jig so the reason why I made this shorter and I separated them into two separate jigs was because the distance between the distance in the front of my table saw here is really only about six inches if you don't have a jobsite table saw like I do and you have more space there I would totally recommend making this into one jig not two so when the jig is in the left-hand miter slot you to line it up when you're looking down at the piece onto the right-hand side of your cut line so I'm going to be cutting out this X part over here so I'm going to line up the blade on when I'm looking down at it the right hand side of the line so if you are looking at it on camera it's actually the left hand side of the line so don't get confused by that and then I'm going to make the cuts on all three of my marks on at the same time and then I'm going to switch a jig to the left hand side and do the same thing so let's get at it I almost forgot I had already set this blade height to the correct height but you have to set your blade height to the line that you made earlier and then you can make the cut see how it is perfectly aligned with that cut line now I'll be continuing sorry about that guys alright let's go now that I've defined all of those cuts I'm going to clean them up just until halfway until I get to that X I don't want to go all the way just halfway to the X and then I'm going to cut the other side and clean up the rest of the cut on the other side [Music] all right so at this point only half of the tails are cut now I'm going to switch it over to the other side and finish the cut now that Jake is in the right-hand miter slot so I'm going to be aligning the blade on the left-hand side of my cut line [Music] now fresh off the saw that is pretty awesome there's a little bit of tear out on the back end over here but I think I could easily clean that up also this is the outside face so this is going to be inside not going to be really noticeable I think that is pretty awesome pretty quick and now it's time to do the tails so this time I did the opposite I barked my in on the board and I faced that up then I take the pin board with the mark facing out facing out and I line it up against my board here making sure that it's flush on the sides and I also use a square at the back to make sure that it's nice and square and then I'll take a very sharp pencil and making sure not to move the pin board I'm going to mark out the pins and just trace them so now the pins are going to fit into these slots over here so this is going to be the waist creating the one two three tails now I just need to mark the height and let's take it over to the table saw alright so this is actually where it gets a little tricky so I didn't some test cuts before so I know if you look at this you can see here is the miter bar and you can see that the distance from these two slots that were cut are not the same so I totally forgot to take into account that my miter slots are not perfectly even distance away from my blade so that means that I'm going to have to change the blade height on either side of the miter slot which is a little bit annoying I think I'm gonna have to try to figure out something else because getting the correct blade height is actually a little bit tricky as well so it appears to me that I have a good blade height right here and it's just kissing the line so I'm actually gonna use a test piece first because I had some trouble with this before so it seems like it's just kissing the line but I don't know let's see so the problem is that the blade when you're setting it it's setting towards the the lower part of the cut so that's I'm really happy that I did a test piece I don't know if you can see that so clearly but the higher corner of the cut is above the cut line so I'm going to lower the blade a little bit let's see how that goes that's closer I just want to get it a tiny bit lower okay I think we're good now alright now I'm going to actually cut my pieces so when it's in the left-hand miter slot again you want to be on the right-hand side of your cut line but this is easier to follow because you could just see that when you tilt it the angle kind of looks like straight to you like that looks wrong that looks right so I'm going to go very close to my line I do not want to go on my line and now I'm just going to repeat the same process for the rest of the tails now I'm going to move it over into the right-hand miter slot and remember because the distance of did I put this miter slot you know what actually I could do I could change the location of this miter slot maybe that's what I'll do all right not right now but I will do that now I need to change the blade height as you can see the blade is now too high so I need to lower it I'm going to do a test cut first just to make sure now it's in the right hand miter slot I'm going to cut on the left hand side of my cut alright so this is what the cut looks like fresh off the table saw and as you can see if you get really close the angle of the blade doesn't allow it to get close to the line so you can't clean up the cut so they do make specialty saw blades that come at a specific angle so that you can get to that cut and you can clean that up I don't see a reason on getting one of those unless I'm constantly making this joint and I work in a production shop or something like that so I'm going to need to clean these up another way we use hand saws a bandsaw I think I'm going to also attempt the router so let's test it out and see which way works best the first way that I'm going to try to clean up the joints is just by using some hand saws so I marked the line across on the side over here and I'm going to clamp it onto my bench now I'm not going to cut on the line I'm going to cut next to X I know I'm going to need to clean this up with a chisel afterwards to clear off the waste in the middle I am going to use a coping saw again I am NOT gonna go on the wine because this does not leave a clean cut at all at least this one and my abilities now I'm gonna try the bandsaw I set up a fence on my bandsaw that's going to cut almost to my line again not all the way to it first I'm gonna try to clean up that one that I just sit with the coping saw cause it's really not so good all right and that's still gonna need a lot of cleanup work with the chisel let me just get the other end so I could just go straight away and clean these up with a chisel but I'm going to try to clean it up with a router let's go see I use the pinboard to set the distance of the bit from the fence you could also use the pin board and see that it's flush so I think we're good to go there and this is actually kind of nerve-wracking because one slip and I have to start all over again but essentially what I'm going to do is just ride the piece along and clean it up until I get to the corners I'm still going to have to clean up the corners with a chisel so that was a little bit nerve-wracking not really the easiest cut to make it have to be really careful that the board doesn't pull and catch and just like completely knock off one of your tails so I'm gonna go clean this up with the chisel now all right scratch that change of plans I just decided to make a new tail board because I did not like that router idea at all I did not like making that cut so I just wanted to make a new board to see how I can chisel straight after using the hand saws or the bandsaw I just want to preface this next part to say that I only did two test pieces before I did this third one that I actually filmed so I'm saying that for two reasons one don't judge me for what you're about to see and two I just want people to feel like even if something seems really intimidating to them like dovetails tend to be intimidating just go for it and just try it this is my third dovetail that I've ever done and I'm sharing this with everyone to the world and I think it came out pretty cool in the end if you're ever scared to do something just go for it being as this was only my third time using a chisel to clean up some dovetails I have no right to give anybody any advice so I'll put a link down below to a video that I watched that was really amazing cleaning up these tails with the chisel was actually the longest part of the whole process it took me about 15 minutes to get it perfect so the pins on the table saw took me about four minutes the tails took me about two and a half minutes and then there was a minute or so at the bandsaw so it took about seven to eight minutes to get it to this point and then I spent 15 minutes cleaning it up so hopefully with practice I'll be able to bring that number down and then these dovetails would be super quick now the moment you've all been waiting for let's see how the joint fits now that was super satisfying now after a bit of sanding now that looks pretty good all right so the end result is pretty awesome I mean that looks really cool this is just in poplar I am not sure what I'm gonna use for my material for the actual project but that looks pretty cool and it's super tight super strong very very excited about that so the pins were super easy to cut so easy the tails were a little bit annoying so I still had to do a lot of cleanup work I still had to use the chisels to try to get it to look perfect so if you're looking for perfection like machine-made perfection the router is your best choice this is not your best choice if you're looking for something that looks like a ten cut and it just takes a lot less time then I think that this is a pretty good option there are definitely smaller jigs out there like this is like it takes up a lot of real estate in the shop so I know I could have just tilted my blade to that angle and done a bunch of different things like that but I'm always scared whenever I tilt my blade that I'm not getting it right so if I have these jigs that are at the fixed angle then I don't have to constantly worry about making sure that my angles are correct I know that while I was assembling it I was worried that the angles were correct but that's a one-time worry over worrying every single time so just weigh your options there these are really big jigs and I also I split them into two because of the the space that I have and my specific table saw and if I had the option if I had the choice I would prefer to have it in one so one side being the tails and one side being the pins that would just take up a lot less room in the shop first of all and it would also be easier to use so overall this was a fun experiment that's all it really was so thank you for watching along I hope that you learned something I hope you tried something that you want to use this jig or that you don't want to use this jig and again huge thank you to this week's sponsor woodcraft where i wouldn't be able to do what i do without them so from their sled to the clamps to the chisels they have it all they have everything that you need for woodworking so go check out the link down below and thank you guys again so much for watching I will see you on the next one

Channel: 3x3Custom - Tamar

Views: 1,467,273

Keywords: dovetail joinery, tablesaw dovetail jig, table saw dovetails, how to cut dovetails on the table saw, how to dovetails, joinery, woodworking how to, woodwork, woman woodworker, woodworking jig, dovetail joint, shop project, tablesaw jig, dovetail jig, dovetail joinery jig, how to make dovetails, woodworking tips, joinery woodworking, joinery for beginners, woodworking projects, table saw dovetail, how to, table saw jig, easy woodworking, joinery techniques

Id: WQaEV34wOz4

Length: 22min 44sec (1364 seconds)

Published: Thu May 09 2019