Dovetails By Hand - Sawing Tips & Tricks

hi i'm rob cosm welcome to my shop in this video dovetails by hand sawing tips and tricks that's what we're going to cover that's what i teach all of my students if you want to be able to cut dovetails like that you've got to master the sawing skills and that's what i'm going to show you very thing i teach all of my students i'm rob cosman and welcome to my shop we make it our job to help take your woodworking to the next level if you're new to our channel make sure you subscribe and hit the notification bell which will alert you whenever we release a new video anytime we use a new tool or technique we'll leave a description down below so that make it easier for you to find all right let's get back to work i was thinking about this the other day i taught my first dovetail class over 30 years ago and in that time i have taught hundreds if not thousands of classes and i know i've taught several thousand students how to do this now my mentor taught me that you assemble the joint right from the saw there is no need for a test fit you shouldn't have to go in there and pair the sides of your pins or your tails you should be able to take it right from the saw and what i'm going to do in this video is i'm going to give you some lessons that will enable you to eventually put that saw right on the line make that cut and not have to touch it afterwards that's the way it should be done in fact one of my mentors was once asked about tilting the tail board to make the angled cuts and he said if you've got a tilt to tail board you need a sawing lesson and that's what i'm going to give you when we're done you're going to be able to go to the shop put that saw on the line make it start exactly where you want and end up with a smooth flat surface that is ready to be joined to the opposite piece this is not difficult if you have the right tool and willing to put a little bit of practice in and follow some good technique anybody can do this and do it well now you can't talk dovetails without talking about saws and i'm going to talk about that for a fair bit because you need to understand what to look for by the way we recently did a video covering the entire process of cutting dove through dovetails and if you haven't seen that we'll leave the link in the in the description down below but today it's just on the sawing process now i've had numerous saws over my 30 plus years of doing this this is all i seem to have left right now but i want to go through and i want to talk about what's so important and i also want to explain what i'm frequently quoted as saying cutting the dovetail is 70 percent the saw 20 percent the technique and only 10 practice and of course everybody always gets all tied up in knots when i say that but let me prove it i'm going to take a piece of hardwood this is a piece of poplar it looks to be about three quarters of an inch thick i'm gonna come in about three quarters of an inch and i'm gonna make a cut as deep as the saw will allow and i'm not paying any particular attention to where i'm sawing or how i'm sawing i'm just letting the saw do its thing now i'm going to cut that piece off so your saw on its own should produce a flat smooth surface which is the two critical ingredients to a good glue joint so when you put that back together you should be able to put it back together in such a way that you can't even see the joint and we can spin it around so as not to match grooves so now when the side of your tail and the side of your pin come together that is a good glue joint it's flat and it's nice and smooth that is a function of the saw so how do you get there well i've gone the japanese route great saws except that little thin blade has a tendency to wander in western hardwoods for soft very light woods sure but for robust western hardwoods of any substantial thickness you're going to find that it's going to leave you wanting more there's some antiques not everybody has access to them they're limited a lot of them saws today have a file handle or round handle the biggest problem with that is it's not very stout and it doesn't give you any registration what i mean is this if you pick up a pistol grip saw that will register by the way it's always a three finger grip index finger lays here and it gives stability to the saw every time you pick it up it's going to register in your hand the exact same way the advantage of that is you start to benefit from where knowing where plum is where 10 degrees to the right is 10 degrees the left because it's locked into your hand a round handled saw you don't have that you're always having to watch the line so right away i'm going to say the round handled saws are out if you're looking for all the advantages that you can muster from just the equipment meaning the saw the antiques are great if you can find them but if you can't well what are you going to do all right what's so unique about this saw well put a piece of wood in here and i'll show you some things there's two things that you have to be able to do with the dovetail saw number one is start it accurately it's no good if it jumps around on you and it ends up a sixteenth of an inch away from your line you may as well use a chainsaw if that's going to happen so you have to have complete control over the starting of the cut well on this particular saw i put little tiny teeth on the first two inches that's what the 22 stands for 22 points or teeth per inch and they have a negative put a negative 25 30 degree cutting face and with that cutting face back like that when you're pushing the saw through the wood it rides over it and it doesn't bite that allows you to get that little groove which is just enough to help track the saw so that when the big teeth come along and engaged they're already held in place and they'll give you all the speed that you need for a good adequate cut you want to have appropriate amount of set the set refers to the fact that each tooth is bent it's either bent to the left or to the right and first tooth bend to the left next tooth bend to the right and that's how it goes down all the way down the blade and be by having those teeth slightly bent out from the saw plate it creates a kerf or a groove that is a little bit wider than the saw blade itself if you didn't have that it would bind in fact you wouldn't get in there more than a sixteenth of an inch and it would get stuck if you have too much set what happens is you get a wide kerf and the blade wobbles back and forth and not only do you have to saw but you also have to steer you don't want to have to do the steering that part is up to the saw once you start that on a given path it's going to continue and it should saw perfectly straight now let's define straight shortest distance between two points so if we put a straight edge on that cut we should see a nice straight saw kerf and the nice thing about a straight saw kerf is it produces a flat surface and you've got to have that now you the user have to learn to aim the saw which is the reason why i brought up how important it is to have a pistol grip so that every time you make a saw cut you're reinforcing muscle memory if you want to call it that where plum is or where 10 degrees to the left or 10 degrees to the right now i use 10 degrees because that's the slope that i think looks the best on a dovetail weight here's a saw that i really like belonged to a friend of mine's father who happened to be a a world war ii vet i like it but it's very very light and when you get into hardwoods you really notice that light saw is very difficult to control has a tendency to want to skip around if you get some weight into your saw very much like woodworking equipment weight helps dampen vibration this saw in particular weighs about 22 ounces or almost double what the average dovetail saw weighs and you'll find it really works in your favor just the weight of the saw is all you need for downward pressure by the way when you're sawing you want to use all of the available teeth that's going to preserve or extend the life of the sharpening if you're working with just a couple of inches in the middle it won't be long and that's dull if you use all of this multiply how long it took to dull that by how long it's going to take to dull that and you'll see how much extra life you're going to get out of your saw you want a pistol grip three finger open pistol grip you want weight it's going to be in your favor i don't like to have a deep saw you'll find some dovetail saws have a lot of blade here's what i dislike about that the farther away the tooth line is from the heavy brass back the more unstable it's going to be and if you consider that most of your dovetails are going to be cut in three-quarter inch or less wood then why do you need two and a half inches depth of cut so narrow blade more stable the less set the better now you have to have some if you only had a thou you're probably gonna find it's going to bind three thou fourth house is starting to get it to the point where it's going to make that surface rough the reason being is because those points stick out like that as you're sawing they're scratching or raking the sides of the kerf and that's going to show up when you're done and the rougher that is the less pretty that or that less clean that joint is going to be i use two thousand and for relative terms a piece of writing paper is four thousandths of an inch so if you were to split that piece of paper that's how much set you have on either side and what that's going to do and there's there's a slight disadvantage although it really isn't when you think about it when you start you're now committed you can't go part way down and try to make a correction which would be impossible to mate to anyway so that has to be straight regardless of whether or not it's at 10 degrees or 5 degrees the tooth count as i told you up here just for starting purposes we're using 22. 15 teeth per inch seems to be just about right when it comes to aggressive fast cutting but controllable the bigger the teeth the more they're going to want to bite into the wood if you're too fine it takes too long gets impatient and if you're cutting something that's 20 inches wide out of hard maple and you're having to make 40 or 60 strokes per side you're gonna be exhausted halfway through all of those things added up and put into one saw is going to make it so that you'll be able to get this down a lot sooner than you would think you gotta have the right equipment experiment based on what i told you and find what works best for you let's talk body mechanics and i've heard others discount this but i think it's important i think you need everything in your favor to make this as positive experience as possible and get you the point where you can cut these dovetails the way you want as soon as you want well first of all i got a piece of poplar in here i would consider that a medium density hardwood and i'm going to swap it out for a piece of very soft pine why well i think you should start practicing on something that allows you to focus on your technique without having to develop the muscle to push the saw through a hard wood poplar a part of me pine basswood anything that's nice and soft i always make sure that the board is sitting low in the vise if it's up here it's going to vibrate which is uncomfortable so i keep it low just a couple inches off the vise off of the surface of the bench and i also want to make sure that it's standing plumb this will reinforce your muscle memory so you know where plum is where you're 10 degrees to the right 10 degrees the left remember that pistol grip and the advantage it produces well it only works if the board is standing plum okay you need a good stable stance so i call this my three-point stance my feet are usually a little wider than shoulder width apart a little bend in the knee and if you were to measure that i'm probably about 15 degrees off the face of the vise my third point is going to be my hand holding onto the board so if you think of the milking stool with its three legs no matter how uneven the barn floor is those three legs will all provide a nice stable platform add a fourth leg and you're always going to have them rocking so a tripod or a melting stool nice and stable so one two three now you want to keep that elbow close to your side but underneath your shoulder so looking from straight on if i were to draw a line i could start at the end of the saw go through my wrist to my elbow my shoulder would be one nice line think of the piston on an old locomotive now in order to do that you've got to turn your body a little bit bend a little bit at the waist so that that elbow drops right underneath that shoulder if you've got your elbow here you're never going to be a very good sawyer you need to bring that in and let that swing like a pendulum right underneath your shoulder so we get in position set that in place nice light grip probably the single biggest problem that new sawyers deal with is when until they've trained the muscles back up in here they over compensate out here by squeezing the life out of that and you have to learn to really relax that you only want to hold it i often use the example of cradling a baby's hand just hold it tight enough to maintain or keep it from dropping onto the floor so nice light grip three finger as we mentioned elbow right underneath the shoulder three-point stance and now you're ready to start sawing now i'm working under the assumption that you have a good vise that securely holds your board if you don't have this style of ice you may have to put another piece of wood on the opposite side to prevent your vice from racking because you do not want that board to be moving around on you now i always i'm going to suggest that the most important thing be that you be able to start accurately so before you draw any lines on there you want to just get to a point where you can get that saw to start with greatest of control so i always create an anchor point that's done with my opposite index finger and thumb and i squeeze the wood but i squeeze with the bottom third of each digit if you squeeze down too low the point of your finger and the point of your thumb are going to be right in line with the set of the teeth and as you're moving it forward and back you're going to cut them so to avoid that bring that thumb up bring the index finger up now the point is above the set of the teeth and you're protected from cutting them keep this finger pulled back by the way so there we go now i'm going to take my saw and i'm going to apply some light lateral pressure by pushing against my fingers and the finger and thumb being anchored that saw cannot skirt to the right or to the left it's held in a track if i need to make some adjustment i can simply push by inchworming my finger and thumb like this to move that saw into position very very light grip if you have a saw with the starter teeth at this point all you want to do is just move that forward and back until you get enough of a groove that you can catch your thumbnail in it at that point you move to the big teeth and start to cut don't need to go very deep in this early phase you just want to practice starting if you don't have starter teeth you've got to add another level of complexity to this and what i teach folks to do or used to is lift take about 80 of the weight of the saw off of the wood so that the teeth are just barely kissing it again what you're trying to do is just get that little groove started that you can then allow the saw to start cutting aggressively by the way i always wipe the sawdust off so when they when i set my saw back down on here the sawdust doesn't fall and obscure my line make multiple attempts at starting that saw you don't want it to jump around remember index finger and thumb create the anchor point light lateral pressure prevents it from skirting off to the right finger and thumb keep it from going to the left and just go in there and practice until 10 out of 10 it starts exactly where you want remember to use the full length of the blade so that you get full life out of the sharpening of your saw now believe it or not the very first thing you're going to do is the most critical process of the dovetail and that is getting that saw cut perpendicular to the board when cutting the tails so i'm going to do a series of lines and i'm careful to make sure that those lines are accurate if you're going to follow your line you better make sure that line's in the right spot i prefer red simply because it's easier to see especially on dark woods pinch index finger and thumb now what you're going to notice is as you do a little bit of this you're going to develop what i call a natural sawing groove here's what i mean i have the saw in my hand i come over here my stance is correct i grab the wood i put let's set the saw down and it falls into my natural sawing groove now if i'm not parallel to the line i have two options i can correct it by moving my arm and start sawing but my body is going to want to go back to where it was so rather than make the correction up here i'm going to pay attention to what i assume is my natural sawing groove and i'm going to adjust with my feet bringing my body around until that blade of the saw lines up with that line on my board now i'm reinforcing my body's natural sawing groove and i should be able to get this just right here's what i'm going to do pinch press the saw laterally push back into position i'm sawing on the left side of that line all i should see to the right of the blade is just line i don't want to see wood in line i don't want to see part of a line i want to see all of the line remind myself of a nice light grip maintain some lateral pressure little pass to get the curve started and then continue now you don't have to go very deep because once you've started that gun that deep you're already committed i'm going to take my six inch square this is the one i use as my rule make sure that the blade is in there so it's not interfering or throwing off your accuracy referencing from the back side my rule is that when you're cutting dovetails as long as your saw blade is within an eighth of an inch over six inches you're probably going to be okay so keeping the square tight to the inside face i'll slide that over until it touches the blade somewhere now at that point i look and i'm out less than a sixteenth of an inch well that is well within spec okay let's do it again only this time because we have to be able to learn to saw on both the left side and the right saw right side i'm going to go to the other side of the of the line now you'll also notice that i've got to move my thumb because if i do it like this i can't see the blade the line so i pull my thumb back but i use it to help anchor my index finger now you can also kind of curl that finger a little bit so that you're running off your nail instead of your finger if your skin is a little bit sticky but same as before i'm applying light lateral pressure this time i'm looking on the left side of the blade with my saw on the right side of the line i want to make sure that all i see is just saw a red line no wood light lateral pressure use those little teeth to get it started or take the weight and like before put the square on there and check it now that one's out a little bit more but it's still under an eighth of an inch so i'm fine now what i would have my students do is continue to do this all the way down saw on one side of the line you don't have to go very deep check it for square saw on the opposite side of the line what that also does is forces you to saw nice and straight because when you make a saw cut out here there's lots of support on both sides of the blade to keep that saw going nice and straight but when you start removing material from one side of the other there's no longer any support out there and that forces you to keep a nice straight sawing line by the time you've gone through a couple of rows of sawing on both sides you'll probably find that you're getting nice perpendicular cuts and as you watch the video we did on sawing dovetails you'll soon realize that perpendicular cut is the make or break to a dovetail be patient try to get everyone perfect don't worry about plum what we're focusing on first is getting a good square cut on the end of the board keep the sawdust clear and i would suggest that you stop and check after every cut put the square make sure there's no debris in here that's going to influence how the square lays against the board and go until you can get them perfect i'm still out less than a sixteenth but it's not going to matter by the time we come down to a three-quarter inch piece now we're going to work on making the plum cuts and the angled cuts so since in real practice or real use you're going to have to have stop at the gauge line i'm going to suggest that you put a gauge line on there with your marking gauge now you may as well practice going down to the line folks get all worried about the angle of their tails well that's actually not critical although it does play a big role in the aesthetics of the joint mechanically the tail board is the template and as long as the second piece being the pin board fits into that template the tail board the joint is going to work but we'll give you some practice on how to get those just the way you want them so we're going to draw some lines we'll work on the angled ones first i'm going to make a series of lines across the end of the board and going from the gauge line up don't let your line run below why sooner or later you're going to follow that line and end up cutting below when you really didn't want to i'm going to go a little less than an eighth of an inch apart again making nice accurate lines and do multiples i would suggest you go all the way across the board and since we have to cut both sides by the way i also find it advantageous to start at the gauge line instead of trying to stop at it almost running out of ink okay when you're making a plum cut you have to start with the saw plum you cannot start and then alter when you're making an angled cut the only difference is you still need to be perpendicular but you're going to have your blade already at that prescribed angle so figure out where it is you may not get it right the first few times but that's why after multiple cuts you can make slight adjustments at this point i just guess and i seem to get it right i'm cutting on the right side of the line so i've got my thumb pulled back index finger is supporting the blade lateral pressure line it up so all i see is the blade i have my saw at what i think is the appropriate 10 degree angle use all the blade and stop at the baseline just so happens that one was right wipe the sawdust clear i'm going to do it again line it up so you see nothing but line now if i was off say i was a little bit too shallow then on the next one i would try to make a angle that blade a little bit more if it's too much then i'd back it off but you just want to keep practicing all the way across the board until you're getting your saw cuts at the angle you want and again more importantly you're perpendicular across the end now don't forget you also have to cut the other side so in this case which is by the way my strong side i have both finger and thumb behind the blade i get great view of the line and i've got wonderful support behind the blade with both index finger and thumb light grip angle that blade at what you think it should be careful to stop at the line sawdust clear and that one's off a little bit so i'm going to tilt it a little bit more and i would keep on going you'd be surprised how little practice it will take before you'll get that right but you have to nail the perpendiculars across the end first get that the rest of it's a piece of cake all right our last exercise applies to the pin board so like with the tail board you're going to have to stop at a gauge line so i'm going to go ahead and put one in now on both sides inside and out and back by the way you always want to cut your dovetail so that the face in this case i would have written written pin board on there you always cut from the face side put your board in the vise make sure it's standing plumb also make sure that it's low in the vise so again it doesn't vibrate now in this case i'm going to use perpendicular cuts across the lines across the face and plum cuts i'm sorry across the end plum cuts down the face keep them a little less than an eighth of an inch apart remember to stop at the gauge line only draw where you want to saw go all the way across the board i'll do a few more just so we can practice both sawing on the left side song on the right side all right when it comes to cutting pins doesn't really matter what the angle is here you're still you're simply following a line but you have to get the plumb cuts right let me explain that because sometimes i don't think folks fully understand it so the walnut piece are my pin cuts if these pin cuts are not plum plum means parallel to the side perpendicular to the earth would be a better explanation plum and parallel if we were to have any slope on these two cuts that means this pin would either be narrower at the bottom or wider either way it's either going to create a wedge and split something or it's going to be narrower and create a gap these are critical so we have to get that right this is where that pistol grip really helps because it will reinforce with every cut your natural ability to make a plum cut the other nice thing about a heavy saw is gravity is a great trainer for where perpendicular or plum is remember the reasons why i always make sure my board is standing plumb so good stance hold the board i'm going to work on the left side of the mark all i see is line get it started with those little teeth or if you don't have that light touch meaning you've got about 20 of the weight of the saw off of the wood until it gets started now eyeball that line light grip and do your best get a nice plum cut you'll after multiple cuts you'll see that you're drifting and most folks are going to drift consistently to one side or the other rarely have i ever had a student who would drift to the left on one cut and the right and the next they always seem to be going in one direction consistently or the other so if i had drifted off to my left then what's happened is i've got a reset what i think was plumb i was sitting like this the blade was actually tilted but i thought it was plum so in my head i'm going to say okay if that's what i thought was plum i'm going to correct it but you know what in correcting it you probably won't go far enough so i'll correct and then i'm going to allow myself to actually over correct now i'm actually thinking i'm going too far the other way but what you'll end up finding out more times than not is that that will be the plum cut you may have to do this every day for several days before you get it consistent each time and to save wood just kidding cut on the other side to practice sawing on the other side of the line and see if you can't go down there and leave just those little splinters of wood that adjust the thickness of your pencil or your pen believe it or not that's all there is to it to sign fantastic dovetails your soft is the critical tool and it does not take a lifetime of practice to get it right if you have a saw that will cut a perfectly straight line you only have to learn to aim it so that it will go in the direction that you want i have you like my work if you like my style of teaching click on any one of these videos to help take your woodworking to the next level and i've always said better tools make it a whole lot easier if you click on the icon with the plane and the chisel it'll take you to our website introduce you all of our tools and also talk to you about our online and in-person workshops good luck in your woodwork

Channel: RobCosman.com

Views: 23,082

Rating: 4.9771647 out of 5

Keywords: dovetails by hand, dovetails by hand video, cut dovetails by hand, cutting dovetails by hand, easy dovetails by hand, how to cut dovetails by hand, dovetails for beginners, dovetails rob cosman, hand cutting dove tail joints, cutting dovetails, how to cut dovetails, making dovetails, sawing better dovetails, sawing dovetails, rob cosman, woodwork, woodworking

Id: n-5ZIIKdLNk

Length: 32min 44sec (1964 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020