How to cut a DOVETAIL HOUSING JOINT by HAND

whoo-hoo I'm teasing you with another dovetail based joint that isn't actually a dovetail joint this one here is the dovetail housing joint or a stopped dovetail housing joint because you can see the dovetail on the back and you cannot see it on the front so in this video I'm gonna show you how to cut this entirely by hand and enlighten you on the process so let's go so of course starting with our two boring bits of timber let's get these attached and getting close as well so of course before we go anywhere tools to cut this joint square knife chisel trusty Jesus pen a sliding bevel a marking gauge a ruler a hammer a rip saw and preferably a crosscut saw and a router plane because they're gonna help you greatly so let's get into marking it out okay so marking this joint out what we're going to do is I think we're gonna join this sabili I'm gonna keep going in that into the ash like this so we're going to be cutting the dovetail onto the end of this and we're gonna be cutting the housing into this and we're going to be making it a stopped housing as well so that you will not see the joint through the front so first thing we are going to do is we're going to get our Jesus pen and we are going to mark our face size and face edges so with this one the joint is going to be assembled like this I think so I'm going to do a face side on here god I need a new one okay so face side there and on the top here like that so there we go that is how the joint is going to be assembled so I can see this face here with my face and I can see this face here with my face I know they're going to go together like that so next one I think we're going to do the base line on this so what we're going to do is we are going to measure the thickness of this material which I know from previous videos to be 26 I don't know why I'm still bothering with that and we're gonna house it in a halfway on there I reckon so let's make this 13 mil so I see this is going in like that and we want to house it in 13 millimeters like that so that means on this edge here we're going to mark 13 millimeters all the way around with our marking gauge so just be nice and careful with this and it's worth saying again the end of this needs to be perfectly square if you haven't watched my one-minute Wednesday's video on how to get endgrain square I would very much recommend watching that because you can do it with limited tools so there we go that marking gauge line is all the way round that gives us our shoulder line and now on here we need to obviously mark a line on here as well so again because it's going in 13 millimeters and obviously here we want to be referencing off our face side so that means getting the marking gauge on here now because this is a stopped housing joint we don't need to mark it on the front here we only need to do it on the back because that is where we're going to be slowing that joint in so because on the back I'm going to make that base line a little bit bigger so base line is all marked out what we're going to do next is the lines along the top here to cut the dovetail so we can now change this marking gauge we don't need that setting anymore so it's 26 so I think we'll go in about three millimeters from each side and then I've got a bit little bit of a flat surface to get my sauce started on so line across the top like that line across this top and we are going to get our sliding bevel and we're going to mark the dovetails on the end of this now now with the ratios on these I would make them a little bit steeper if you're one of those people who say I know one-in-eight for hardwoods and one in 6 or softwoods something like this you don't really want to be doing it one 1/8 I'd recommend increasing that pitch a little bit so I'm going to do this around 1 and 6 but like I said in previous videos I'm not going to be too fussy about this because I think the theory behind dovetail ratios is a little bit pointless to be honest and I'll be covering that in a future video in the form of a rant so it's got to the point now where it's just a little bit stupid to be honest so it dovetails marks on the edges here so I'm not going to bother marking it on the other side as well because I'm not gonna be able to see that face as I'm soaring yet so dovetail is marked on there the next thing we're going to do is where we want that stopped groove to end so I reckon we'll probably do about 10 millimeters from the edge on here so I'm going to set this marking gauge to 10 millimeters now if you watch my told your video on the Veritas marking gauge versus the type mark marking gauge your know I'm here that I've got little graduations on here but allow me to lock the head of this at a specific dimension without having to get a measuring yet say it's a little convenience obviously so in here quick reminder again they're going in like this which means the groove is going to be in this kind of section here and we're going to stop it around here that ten millimeters from the edge so on here because they're going together like that that means that we're going to be cutting the dovetail all the way along here and then we're going to be cutting this end off here which is at the front to allow it to slide up flush with the front here so let's mark that on so that's where our groove is we've marked ten millimeters so marking gauges on there marked off our face edge on here like this we're going to do exactly the same on this sapele so mark it off the face edge on here and look that's where our line is happy days and that is actually all the marking out we can do at this point we actually need to saw this out now so to the vise so the components now in the vise it's all locked around we're going to cut this dovetail shape out of it now so I've got my tenon saw for this because it's got a much longer plate on it so I'm able to get better strokes on it you probably could use a dovetail saw for this as well but it's gonna be quite a bit of effort for you if you have a fine toothed dovetail saw so say around 20 TPI that's probably gonna clog up you want it to be around 14 TPI for example the 14 TPI is what the standard Veritas dovetail saw comes out and that is the one I recommend that's what I've been using to the past four years so anyway dovetail shape cut into it so I'm going to use the tips that I shared with you in my video how to solve a linear for that if you haven't watched that nibble away until I get to that line again I'm gonna level out the saw and then just watch out to make sure I don't hit that base line at the bottom of this lace or a few more strokes yeah that's looking pretty good so now we've just got to chop off this little end here for our stopped groove so ignore that pen line on there that's just where I'll scribbled on it earlier I have got a little knife line for me to work to here at the back level the saw out so let's get all those excess bits off now so this is why I said ideally you could have a crosscut saw for this bit because we are cutting across the grain but if you watched my video and what sauce do you need you'll know that you can actually use a rips or to cross cut timber so I'll do that for you now just to prove it so nibble away at the back the only difference is with using a rip saw for cross-cutting is it's just not as clean but as you can see still works exactly the same yep all right now let's get cleaning this up so same as all the other joints we've done when we are chiseling down to these shoulder lines we're not going to be standing here and doing it because I can't see if that chisel is tilting forwards or backwards much whereas if I stand here with my eyesight in line with the hold line I can see if that is all is square or not and therefore give myself a nice square shoulder line as I said before your eye is naturally good at seeing square and if it isn't good at seeing square you can just simply put your in the knife line that slider square out to the back of the chisel voila you know it is square so in close now so we're just gonna work our way along evenly again so I've got a millimeter here left so I'm going to take off half a millimeter all the way along and then do the final chop at the shoulder line say now chisel in the final shoulder line what I'm not going to do at this point is pop my chisel right on the edge because if I accidentally undercut this we're gonna see a gap in the joint along here so I'm gonna start it about three millimeters back from that front edge and I'm just gonna chop down from there and then when it comes to cleaning up this section we're gonna flip this timber up on end and then we're going to chisel down into it from this way here so anyway like to say three millimeters back from the front edge get the chisel square and this back edge here I'll stop three millimeters from it we could in theory come from this way like we are with the front but I'm not going to bother it's the back edge we can just chisel it down and they're looking in from my direction I can just follow that shoulder line down so chisel in there and then just small taps yep so I've just followed that shoulder line down the back edge here but I can see clear flip it over and exactly the same thing on the other side okay so I've gone all the way around this on both sides now and like to say we've stopped three millimeters from the front here and we are going to attack that from the front face here to ensure we don't get any visible gaps so it scrub that in there and firstly we're going to remove that one millimeter take it down to a half a millimeter from the shoulder line right now chisel in that shoulder line and just be very careful here because again if you undercut it it's going to show a gap on this face here I would rather have a gap on that face then on the front face to be honest that's why I'm doing it this way right and just do some final cleanup and again what I'm seeing here if you watch my previous video you'll know that I mentioned about seeing this white line around the edge and that means that you have hit that marking gauge line spot-on around the edge if you cut any deeper of that and remove that white line well it means you've gone too deep so if you see that white line it's a good thing so I'm just going to do a little bit of paring around the edges now just make sure there is nothing in those corners they go something there lovely now the only thing we need to check here is if this face here is square now if you have a combination square it's going to be great for this because you can just slide it to adjust that I don't actually have one it does look a little bit ski-lift to me looks like I had an off day with soaring there we go so that's gonna pop the chisel in there and pare it down again it doesn't really matter it if you undercut this one because this is never going to be seen just got a pop our chisel in that marking gauge line on the top there get in there square now this is end grain so it is possibly going to follow the grain here but because it's such a minimal amount we should be ok see how it broke off at the very end there that's it following the end grain all clean up on this edge I think I might just slightly undercut it just to make sure it doesn't stop it from bottoming out on there otherwise that looks pretty good now that part of the joint is all done ok so now we need to mark the dovetail into the edge of the timber here so we know at what angle to cut now the convenient part here is obviously face side here face edge face side here face edge which means they need to go together like this and the convenient thing about this is when we're marking this dovetail we could simply use that bit that we've cut out there to hook around the edge and then mark it out on here like that so there we go we're just going to clap this in the voice now I've just got to make sure that the shoulder line on the back here is properly pressed up against it and you know it'll be properly pressed up against the edge and the shoulders here because the end grain on this timber will line straight up with the marking gauge line we in the edge of the ashtray so that looks pretty good our curses of being left-handed I'm gonna have to sort of like reach over this one with my arm but like mark to start with very light mark with the knife line on that side and then on this side walkers shaking me omelette okay so that dovetail is marked in there now and we're just gonna get the old Jesus pen and make sure that we aren't removing this material here there we go and next thing we've got to do now is get those marking gauge lines and we have to square those across to the front know of see with this we are squaring them up to the marking gauge line we've got on the back here it's a little bit hard for you to see it's around there so do not cut them beyond that because that is where I'll stop the groove is so a knife in the line here where the dovetail ended square on the back edge because that is where our face side edge cool so there we go we've got all of our material to remove there and we're going to do the bulk of that with a sort and then we've got a little bit of cleanup to do afterwards so this bit here is obviously quite difficult to do because if this was a through housing joint we would just be let's get our saw on the back edge and saw straight through but because we want to keep this bit of material here we're actually on to angle the sword back a little bit now this is quite difficult for beginners because they're trying to work out if they need to tilt the saw to match this angle down here but then it's throwing it off on top just remember that all this is is you're getting it square along that line to start with next thing we need to do is tilt it back to stop it from hitting the edge here and the next thing to do is we need to match the dovetail angle that's all it is there's nothing like this where you haven't swangle the saw like that so again I'm just going to take a little nibble to start with I'm not going to take it down to that final line I'm gonna leave it about half a millimeter away or a millimeter or so and just keep going away the dust as you go so then you can see if you're going past that line or not so as I do this I'm watching both lines here now at the front here it is right on that marking gauge line don't worry if you go past that because the shoulder on this will hide that the only issue is if you saw straight through the front so don't worry too much if you go fast the marking gauge line here just make sure you don't hit this front corner okay so that is most of that done now and now we can just get to work on removing most of that material obviously it's only gonna remove easily up to a point because the sore is gone in an angle if it is straight through we could just whack it all the way through like we did on the cross carving joint so get a chisel to match this width here that one looks a tad too wide so I'm going to move down a bit and again I'm looking at it along this length here so I can see if much is all it's tilting forwards or backwards that's removed and now we're starting to follow that saw line up so it's getting difficult to remove with chiseling down to this final baseline if you haven't quite hit it with a saw the best thing to do is get your chisel in there and just roll it up a little bit so it hits that baseline so I'm here I'm about a millimeter off just roll that chisel up there we go let's hit the baseline and now when I walk into it it's not gonna split along that entire length or at least we hope so okay so that first bit of material that broke off there that's gone right up to the corner backwards with it so again be careful with this [Applause] essentially all you're doing here is just removing material so chop down chop in from the front chop down chopping from the front and just taking out corners at a time until we work our way back to this shoulder line here and then we can get work on the final cleanup so it's going to take a while I will see you on the other side [Music] [Music] okay so now obviously all of the course work is done we're pretty much there now we've got to do the medium cleanup we're working our way down to those baselines and see where we're at after that so like say this what I call the medium cleanup so what we're going to do only use a trouser plane for this similar to the previous joints you can do this with a chisel and just chisel out the bottom of that if you have a depth gage that'd be great because then also you can run that along the top here find any high spots in the bottom here and remove them of the chisel the router plane is obviously a blade with a built-in depth stuff anyways so it doesn't matter so on the front I've got that lined up with my base line I'm just going to drop it a little bit more cool there we go we're just going to run that through the back here I'm getting a little bit of resistance so I'm just gonna pop my chisel in there and get rid of that what you want to be careful here is do not push too hard because it's entirely possible just to smash out that back wall there and that's obviously that's going to destroy your components quite considerably I reckon the bottom of that is looking good the next thing we've got to address is these dovetail angles here now there's two ways of doing this the first one is having a material up on end like that and chiseling down here following this line down the front which will work however your chisel has the potential to sort of fall out of that line there it's gonna be difficult to get back into it but you know if you're careful you have a really sharp tool you can do that the way I tend to do it because I think I'll get a little bit more control and I can commit to smaller chops is working with it flat like this and then simply getting the widest chisel I can find enough position to myself again so I'm looking down the line like this pop the chisel in the knife line like that elevate it until I match that dovetail angle and then just tap it through I'm going to do this really carefully and make sure I'm following that Duff cell the whole way down okay so we've bottomed out now I'm going to lock my hand in that position and simply just remove it up to the next line and then just keep tapping okay so the hand is obviously moving a little bit at that point so it started slipping out of the dovetail but that's okay we're down to the shoulder line here we will do that in our fine-tuning at the very end where we'll pair away the little bits of material that we have left in order to achieve that fine fit so just work down as best as you can to your marking gauge lines now and we'll final tune it at the end okay so that is work down to the knife line on the top here or just a little corner of it luckily it's hidden so yeah okay that's all marked down to the line here we just got this little bit at the front here to make sure is square or we can undercut it if we want I'm just gonna chisel it down and do it by eye so I'll just get rid of all these fluffy bits for now get it as close we can and then we'll pop the joint together and see where we're at chances are we're gonna have to fine-tune this right I think that's it so let's get our dovetail and see where we are at so we've got the face side on the front here which means that our face side needs to go on like that dovetail in the back okay it's sticking which is good yes it's it's around there that's sticking so what I'm going to do is on here just do a small pen mark make sure it isn't going beyond the shoulder line here just a pen mark there and a pen mark there and then I know that when I take this apart I've got my two little pen marks there and I can look in here and see whereabouts in that area it looks like I've got material wedging it and I can already see something on this side well it looks like the pitch of the dovetail isn't quite steep enough let's get our chisel in there actually I've got the line there and that's exactly where it stopped so and because the fit was so nice at the front here it means that I can just sort of eyeball the rest of this and just make sure that there's no steps or anything get the fluffy bits out so you can get right into that corner okay that's good and now we're just going to swap to the other side again there's a small hump in there that I can see which done I say just as well okay right let's try it again shall we they like that okay oh hello who's getting all the way oh look at that it's me it has bottomed down in there and that being a dovetail joint mostly you can't pull it apart so you see nice and crisp all the way along there okay now on the back here it looks like my router plane might've ever so slightly dropped a bit now I'm not blaming the tools by any means I know that I should have checked it but this is one of the things you need to be cautious with the Veritas router plane about like I said in previous videos something about it feels loose and that is one of them the blade can just sometimes drop like that and I'm pretty sure it's because of this locking collar on it other than that really great tool but you just need to keep an eye on it so anyway excuses aside let's plane it flat and see what that does okay so there are two things on this joint which bugged me obviously this bottom line here I'm not too happy with I feel like we could have got that crisper but that was just because the router plane dropping and I just didn't notice it happening so that was operator error there I should have checked that as I was going but I'll see this bit here is another issue now that's getting a little bit closer so that there is the corner of the chisel as I was going in to clean out that corner like this the flat spots on the side of this Leigh Neilson here that is what has caused that bruise in the corner there now if you watch my toward your video on chisels this was one of the things I brought up when you're pairing into dovetails like this having chisels with wide flat spots on the sides like that can end up doing something like this if you're careful the way to prevent it is to skew the blade as you put it in like that with this I obviously went in straight and as a result the flat spot on the side has caused this bit here so have an overview of that video that was one of the problems with the Leigh Nielsen's in that they had these flat spots and the cheaper ones as well whereas Veritas chisels for example have the tapers on this ground down to a complete point meaning I could go right into that corner with the chisel straight and I wouldn't get this sort of bruising so again that was something that I could have prevented that was just me hacking out material and not paying attention to what I was doing it's not clock at night now so uh let me offer bit and there we go that is how you cut a dovetail housing joint now I want to be completely transparent view of see if something doesn't go right in this videos I am going to show you what went wrong and how you can fix it so in the case of here like I say router plane dropped I wasn't paying enough attention to it my mistake I know that's all better than that I should have checked it and obviously that corner where I've bruised it with the chisel again that was due to my carelessness and you could quite easily avoid that but other than that the joint looks pretty good to be honest luckily that's the back so you'll never see that in theory but I'm just creating excuses for myself ya know so on the front here it's completely optional to make that our stops joint you can have that dovetail all the way through if you want that to be a feature or not just make sure you take a little bit of time and care with it because again you don't want to have gaps like this showing on the front I can get away with it on the back because I'm a right old cowboy like that but anyway I hope that video was enlightening Chuck comments below and I will see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Matt Estlea

Views: 158,802

Keywords: woodwork, woodworking, dovetail housing joint, how to hand cut woodworking joints, dovetail joint, beginner woodworking joints, cut to cut a dovetail housing joint by hand, how to cut a dovetail by hand, what saws for woodworking, furniture making, cabinet making, refining woodwork joints, beginner woodwork, intermediate woodwork, joint, axminster, lie nielsen, veritas, router plane, chisel, handmade, hand cut, furniture joint, dovetailing, woodworking by hand, housing joint by hand

Id: dwoaTBDMpPw

Length: 23min 3sec (1383 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 13 2017