Easy Hand Cut Dovetails With A Magnetic Guide

the joinery is going to be hand cut dovetails and it's easy for me to screw this up as far as the tales as far as cutting them on the appropriate board so I marked on the top surfaces which will also designate the top surface of each one of these boards joint number one joint number two three and four and then on each front face of the board's I wrote eighty four tails p f-- appends it typically would have to do that if you know that the long pieces are going to have tails on both sides the short pieces are going to have pins on both sides but going ahead and doing that also lets me know the outside face of each one of these joints because all of these dovetails will be through dovetails I'm setting my marking gauge to the same distance as the thickness of the material and each one of the pin boards will get marks on the ends of the long faces only and each one of the tail boards will get marks on both the long faces and these short faces I'm leaning over my camera so hopefully I don't screw this up I'm just going to try and show you the best I can this line on either side over here represents a half pin I'm cutting these joints tails first so I need to mark out the tails on the end of my tail board half pin half pin and I used my dividers which is nothing more than just a drafting compass that I removed the lead and added another nail in but I use these to set an equal spacing on both sides made a little point struck with a nice little line and that's my half pin now I want to mark out the tails on the inside and I want them to be symmetrical so I am using this set of dividers now the distance from one point to the other point on these dividers equals one full tail plus one full pin so I want three tails so let's gently without leaving any indentations in the wood let's walk this off one two and three and what I want to end up over here is I want to be off into space over here and I want to have the distance from where I end up to this point to be about twice the distance of this edge to this point because this is a half pin and I want a full pin so as you can see I'm not quite here yet so I will increase the since not by much because it's going to be multiplied by three for the three tails so one two and three I'm not quite there yet so I'll increase a little bit more and once you have the set you can mark all of your joints really fast so right there I'm about twice the distance to this point as this edge is to this point so that's going to be a full pin this is a half pin now what I can do is actually make marks so one tail and pin two tails and pins and that's it from this side so I'm going to start over here and go the opposite direction one tail and pin and one tail and pin so that gave me four points in the middle I can put my pencil into the point and strike some lines now I have evenly spaced tails one two and three and evenly sized pins full pin full pin half of that distance equals a half pin and a half pin everything is nice and symmetrical and now that I have this set and I can go ahead and mark all of my other joints as well I've got to dovetail saws to choose from to make these cuts now this saw for me is very fast but I am NOT efficient with this I can make some really nice joints but not consistently so for me I want this to look nice I'm going to use a magnetic guide and a thin Japanese pull saw so the magnetic guide just sticks onto the saw and it will guide the saw at the appropriate angle through the cuts so for me I don't have to go through the step of marking these these these angled lines but if you're using one of these saws it's a good idea to make the lines that we have something to follow now something else that I did is use a pencil to mark my cutting gauge line because I have a hard time seeing and that will make me identify this line a lot easier without sawing through it on the outside face it's okay to saw through it just a little bit on the inside because it's going to be covered up and then Walter see it but on the outside face which is where I put my t4 tails I don't want to go past this line with the saw all I have to worry about is moving the guide left to right into the appropriate position to make the appropriate angled cuts in now in the tailboard we need to remove all of the pins the pins are the waste and you can chisel this away I like to use a cheap coping saw as a ten-dollar coping saw and just remove all of the material as much as I can with the coping saw before I break out the chisels now I don't put the coping saw in this the saw kerf that I've already made because I have a tendency to just screw up my this the size of my tails so it just takes a second longer to cut another kerf right down the middle of the pin and then sawed left or right to remove as much waste as I can the half pins on the side can be removed with a dovetail saw making sure to stay as close as possible to the line and if you're accurate and stay on the line with your cut you and you have to use any chisels to clean this up later as you can see I did not do that great of a job removing the bulk of the material with the coping saw but that's okay because the rest can be chiseled out I've already done the other side of the joint now I'm going to finish it over here so you want to chisel about halfway through the thickness the material and then work from the other side which is what I'm doing right now and because I have so much here it I don't want to start at the knife line and then just plow through all this because typically when you have more material on the waste side of the knife line it's going to push the chisel a little bit into your workpiece and you don't want that to happen because anything on this side of the knife line is going to be shown with a little gap if this chisel moves once the joint is completed so I'll remove the bulk of this material really quick with a couple couple passes with the chisel and then I will work from my knife line to make this nice and neat any remaining crap that may be in the way can be removed with a chisel I don't want to push all the way through because then I could end up breaking out the other side so I'm only working with the first half from my side then I can flip the board around and get this side once all the junk is out of the way then the detail board is pretty much done with all of my tails done I can start in on the pins and I made sure to get the same number joint here this is joint number three on both the tails and the pins piece and then I also have both outside faces facing up now these need to be marked like so and there's a couple different ways to hold the material and the Vice the way that you need it and I've got a little jig here that will allow me to to hold this piece perfectly vertical and allow me to slide the tail piece against this stop so that it is perpendicular right over the pin board and now I can transfer my my tails to the pin board with a marking knife now these probably aren't showing up that well on the video but I can see these just fine and just to make sure that I don't screw up I'm going to put some marks or some pencil in the waist area I'm cutting out the area that will be that was the details on this board that'll leave me all the pins to make my pin cuts I'm going to use the same magnetic guide but I'm going to rotate it so that the angle is no longer no longer in the up-and-down direction but the angle is in the front-to-back direction this will make the saw blade cut vertically but on an angle that will match the pins now this particular blade is very thin but it does have some thickness to it so I want to make sure that the entire blade is on the waist side of the cut and not in the pins itself so in this case this first tail needs to be removed and I want to leave this pin so I'll position the saw so that the outside face right here only that face will touch my marking gauge line and then I can make the first three cuts and I say three in this instance because I'm right-handed and I only want to use the right side of the jig so I can make one cut to three with this particular set up and then I will rotate both the jig or the magnetic guide and the board 180 degrees and then I can still use my right hand saw on the right side of the jig to cut the other three cuts just like the tails I'll use the coping saw to remove the majority of waste and then chisel down to the line I haven't even cleaned up my inside corners of these pins really quick I just want to test this joint and if so long as I followed the the lines appropriately and cut on the appropriate side of the joint this should fit together very easily so I haven't trimmed up the inside corner so I'm not going to drive it all the way home but everything is lining up just fine and I can't get that type of consistency with a a traditional western-style dovetail saw this little guy like I said it's not sponsored video anything but one of these little magnetic guides very awesome you get very consistent results so long as you saw on the appropriate side of your marking lines so this is going to go together very nice there's not ain't not any gaps at all and there shouldn't be any whatsoever once I clean up these inside corners of the pins and drive this home so that's one joint done or one set of pins done I should say I've got all the tails cut I'm gonna go ahead and cut the rest of these pins really quick after gluing up a dovetail joint on all my other test pieces I normally smear a bunch of sawdust on the outside of the joint to hopefully push a little bit of sawdust inside any of the cracks that may be there and make everything look all nice and neat I think I'm not going to do the sawdust method on this glue up just because I'm kind of curious to see how well these joints actually did turn out you

Channel: Jay Bates

Views: 483,301

Rating: 4.868608 out of 5

Keywords: jayscustomcreations, jay bates, easy woodworking project, woodworking, woodshop, woodworking projects, make, build, hand cut dovetails, dovetails, dovetail, hand tools, hand saw, dovetail saw, japanese saw, magnetic guide, dovetail guide

Id: ukL8vfp1Lwg

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 06 2016