Houndstooth Dovetail - Joint of the Week

[Music] on this week's joining the week we're gonna do the very decorative and very cool houndstooth dovetail this is a joint that's used in decorative boxes as well as work benches it connects with the chop it connects your side panel with the chop and it's a decorative way to do that is traditionally a dovetail it's a pretty easy joint it's kind of a combination of a couple things but if you can cut a dovetail you can do this we're gonna do it in a half-blind fashion you don't have to you could do it as a full through dovetail as well so let's get started first things first I'm gonna make sure I have super square ends when you're doing dovetails this big squareness is a good thing to really keep track of I have an issue I need to discuss with my table saw which you see is off by about a degree which is seems like a bigger problem than just adjusting the table that hasn't happened before so I'm gonna use my shooting board and just square this thing up and make sure we're good and I'm just gonna check regularly so there we go okay so the first thing you want to do on a houndstooth dovetail is lay out now we're gonna do ours as a half-blind as if we were doing the chop at the end of a workbench in fact I cut these pieces sort of to resemble a workbench they're three inches tall the chop is about two inches you would do that out of eighth quarter material and so I'm gonna have my half-blind come to a quarter inch and I'm just gonna use my combo Square to get that measurement I know I've mentioned it a hundred times but it's just the most useful tip here combo square should have indents where the measurements are laser etched in there so I just use it to put the wheel of my marking gauge in and the outside of my board which I have labeled is going to be facing you the viewer right now so I'm just going to mark that quarter inch in there and then what's cool about that is I can take the measurement for my tail board and you kind of want to do them in this order that I'm doing it because it just helps you especially if you only have one marking gauge but I can just put it right in that line snug it up to my board here and then go and Mark my tail board at the same time doing it lightly first and then a little bit you just want to make sure those lines are meet up all the way around there so we want to tails and we want to think about layout and so we want we know we want our pins to be sort of narrow so the way that I like to layout especially when I'm doing even number tails is I like to take off a quarter inch from both sides and then take the measurement in between them so that's two and a half inches I'm gonna split that in half which was one and a quarter and this is just roughly out I'm not gonna use this for actually cutting this is just to help me when I mark out on my tail board how I'm gonna do it so we know that we're gonna have our measurements there and then we can split those in half and that's where our little houndstooth dovetails are going to go so there's a good indication so when we're laying out our tail board we can make sure we get those measurements right okay now we want to measure how far down we want our houndstooth to go and this is where it can get a little bit tricky I like to go down to thirds because I feel that's aesthetically pleasing but you're marking gauge is going to have to change by the distance this quarter inch that we already measured so you want to not make this arbitrary you want to do it something that is measurable and repeatable so that you can adjust your marking gauge accordingly and so what I like to do is I find a measurement that's about two thirds on my ruler and set it to that and that way I know I can take a quarter inch off of it so I'm doing one in three eighths and then that way I can easily take a quarter off that so I'm just gonna mark out and only right below where my marks are for my houndstooth I'm just gonna make a little mark like that and then I'm gonna readjust my marking gauge and you're gonna want to verify these measurements after you cut your tails but you should be right on so we're going to go ahead and readjust our marking gauge and then we can go ahead and transfer that to our tails board and again do these kind of light because you don't want to have to sand out too much later okay perfect so now we have our depth laid out now it's time to lay out our tails okay now we've already laid out on our pin board where we're going to put them so I'm just going to basically rough this is just a rough chance and do it lightly in pencil let me get my ruler and make sure everything's right and then on these little houndstooth I'm just gonna go 1/32 on either side and keep them really thin and that is gonna give us those nice thin pins we're after so one thing you might want to do that'll help you if you're not using a Katz moses magnetic dovetail jig is just draw these lines out with like a dovetail marker I of course I'm going to be using the Katz Moses jig so I don't really need to but it will help you sort of remember where everything goes okay we're gonna go ahead and cut these remember don't go past your lines on your your little houndstooth there that's a common mistake that I made when I was first learning these is I would forget and go past my line I'm gonna breeze through these I have a great video called a comprehensive guide to cutting dovetails it has every tip and trick I've ever learned about cutting dovetails but we're gonna breeze through these and get this waste cleared out and then we'll check back in when it's time to clear out some waste on our half blind side [Music] okay now we are going to mark out our tails onto our pin board and this is where you want to verify those depth gauges that you made before a great little trick for making sure that your board is up against your depth line is you could take a chisel set it right in your marking gauge line and you can just pull your board to it and then once your chisel is touching the top and the bottom you know you're right on that marking gauge line then you want to look through and verify that your marking gauge lines you did for your houndstooth tails are there and then using depending on how skinny you made your tails you want to use a skinny marking knife then you want to just mark out your tails you also want to verify that your marking gauge line from before is right on as well what's great about these dovetail alignment board soon you could see out a little movement there but it's really easy just to go reference right back against the fence I have CNC versions of these on my website now here's where you want to mark out the depth on your pin board so you can just take your marking gauge and that's where you're going to set up this line here and this is gonna be your depth line and if you want to see where you're gonna be going to you can take your marking gauge and continue down the tail line that you marked out now we're gonna go ahead and start cutting out our waist and if you're gonna use your jig I highly recommend that you put some tape or this is UHMW you HMV a caramel tape and it's just a the same thing those white cutting boards are made out of it's a super slick surface and it just helps because of the tooth set on your saw will scratch the face of your jig if you don't protect it otherwise you can cut these by hand because there's not a lot of signing you can do waste I'm gonna stay a little bit away from our line because what's great about half blind is the only thing that matters is this face and maybe the first very little bit maybe the first 32nd of an inch so I'm gonna get pretty close to my line then I'll use a chisel and I'm gonna sort of undercut them by about one or two degrees just so that it's easy for this to slide in especially once we get glue there so I'm gonna stay a little bit away from my line you want to make sure you don't go past this line and the base line you set behind you here we're gonna use the jig and then from there we'll just start taking out waste one way or another I'll give you some ideas a minute [Music] okay so now we have to figure out how to get this waste out of here and you want to be really careful and make sure you identify what your waste is I do it with pencil you could do it with marker but basically you're keeping that that and that the rest is garbage and so there's a lot of ways to do this I've seen Matt Pomona which is a really cool idea use a drill press to get some of this waste out you could use a chisel you could probably use a router there's a lot of ways to do it but I'm just going to do the old-fashioned way with chisels here because that's not going to take too long especially what you have to remember is keep your marking knife lines till the end get everything out of there and then the last thing you should do is take those marking knife lines so don't work to those yet just get try and get a bulk of the waste out and this is a good time to maybe use your second set of chisels make sure you're nice chisels are sharp this is a mat escalated trick make sure you're nice chisels are sharp use your dole you know you're not as good ones while it's really hard not to swear there get out a bulk of the waste and then use your nice ones to get down the line save you some sharpening I guess so let's get to chop it [Music] okay so I've got the first kind of side of one of the bigger tales cleaned out and I think I'm gonna call an audible and go over to the drill press and try and clear out some of this waste it's just it is really hard with these houndstooth to get in some of these corners so I to make it easier on myself I'd love to be able to clear out some of that with the drill press and then it's really easy to chisel down to your lines because it's endgrain I did have one little slip up here in the corner where I took away too much but you know what we'll figure out a way to hide that with a little piece of walnut or something but all in all it's coming along really well it's just when you get into that opposite corner that's at the tip of the hounds tooth it is really hard to get in there I kind of did a series of chopping down and then kind of scooping motion with my chisel to sort of get into the corners and make sure everything was cleared out when you do think you have everything cleared out take a square stick it in there and just you know verify both visually and by feeling with your square that it's not hanging up on anything that you have cleaned it down to the level you've which you need so we're going to go ahead and set up at the drill press and use a small Forstner bit to sort of clear out some of this waste okay so we've got all this cleaned up and we're ready to glue this up and see what it looks like you know one of the things that I learned while I was doing this those back corners are really hard to get into so that drill press was really really helpful I would definitely do it that way next time and also just when you're trying to get in the corners you got to use all the tools that are available to you whatever you got you're gonna find interesting ways to get into those corners whether it's a skew chisel or you know a really small chisel that kind of thing but I would work your way into the corners you know going from the side to the back to the side of the back don't just try and get it all at once you're gonna get a big divot in there all right so we're gonna go ahead and glue this up you know I've had this experience before and just a little warning put a clamp around your piece these walls can get really thin and it just sort of helps things from splitting apart if you're worried about it at all all right let's get this put together see what she looks like [Music] Wow guys that really came out so good I'm really happy with this one and I feel like I learned so much and that's what join of the week really is about it's about pushing myself and practicing things that I haven't done before and learning and so here's what I learned one is the first third when you're coming in cutting when you're clearing out waste for your pins make sure that's really flat that's going to help you reference for the back because the back is really tough to get into you got to use all the tools available to you to really clear out that waste use the drill press to clear out waste and that's something I've seen Mac Cremona do on half blind dovetails it really works it works great and it really helps the more waste you get out of there the easier chiseling is the other thing that is always true when you are chiseling into endgrain as you would on the pins of any set of dovetails but especially when you're doing something that's half blind especially when you're doing something that's this big is endgrain chisels really fast so don't get to that line until you're ready and when you do make sure your chisels right in it and make sure you're at 90 and then with any half-blind you can undercut everything below the surface doesn't really matter because it's never going to be seen so make it easy on yourself undercut it by a couple degrees and it's gonna be really easy to seat your piece and make sure you fit it in there when you hammer it home let me know down in the comments what you'd like to see on journey of the week have a wonderful day stay safe in the shop we'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Jonathan Katz-Moses

Views: 292,670

Keywords: woodworking, dovetail, dovetails, houndstooth, dovetail joint, houndstooth dovetails, how to cut dovetails, how to cut houndstooth dovetails, hand tools, houndstooth label, how to cut a dovetail joint, through dovetails, hand cut dovetails, blind dovetail, hand cut dovetail joint, full blind dovetail, secret dovetail, cove and pin dovetail, 5 minute dovetail, secret miter dovetail, secret mitre dovetail, how to make a dovetail joint

Id: WeKzg2VDlBs

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Sun May 05 2019