How to cut a DOVETAIL JOINT by HAND

well you've all been waiting for it and you've all been waiting patiently today we are going to be cutting the through dovetail joints so this is a rather long video so I'm going to stop chatting let's get going so of course starting with our two blank bits of timber let's get it closed and see what tools we need so tools we need for this joint a marking knife a marking gauge another marking gauge a square a selection of chisels hammer a jesus pen a dovetail saw and some sort of fret saw coping saw sort of thing and other tools that you may find useful and you have a choice between our firstly a sliding bevel or you could use a dovetail marker or you could use some sort of dovetail guide and other options you have our a ruler to layout the tails or you could use compass to layout the tails and one final option you could also use a crosscut saw for cutting the ends of the tails off but a dovetail saw will do it so you don't need that so anyway in close let's get these all marked out alright let's clear all this up ok so what we've got here is two different thicknesses of components and I have conveniently done them out of two different colors so you can easily see the difference between them so I've already got my face sides and face edges marks on these so I know what orientation they're going to go together so face side will be out face I'll be out and the face edges will be either down or up don't really matter cause I'll just flip it over either way so first thing we need to do is mark out how deep we want these components to nest into each other so we're going to be using a marking gauge for that now in the intro I stated that you needed two marking gauges and the reason for this is because these two components are different thicknesses if they are the same thickness you only need one so happy days so I'm going to set this Veritas one to the thickness of the ash here which is going to be our tails the first point I want to make here is that I have a few options as to where I set this marking gauge if I set it so it's flush with the edge of the timber here it means that when I put the joint together all the components again align together perfectly now this sounds really great because it means off so you've got less work later on in terms of planing but what I like to do is actually set my marking gauge a tiny tiny bit beyond the corresponding components so I'll show you what I mean by this okay so here's the end of Yosh and there's the marking gate so like I said if I set it beyond it not that much I'm just sort of exaggerating it for now if I set it beyond it it means that when I assemble this joint it means that the tails and the pins are gonna sit proud of each other and I'll be playing down endgrain to get them flush if I set this so the marking gauge doesn't quite reach the far edge it means that I'm going to be playing down these long grain surfaces to get the joint flush now in most cases it's actually a lot easier to plane down the end grain to get it flush so what I tend to do here is leave it overhanging a bit and you might wanna do this by is very very small what I tend to do is overhang the marking gauge drag it back and then pinch it around the timber so now if I lock that down and rotate it round you can see that the wheel isn't quite resting on the edge it is actually dipping below that surface a bit but if I feel that it's a very very very small amount so that means I'll have n grain to pair down at the end which like I say is usually easier in most cases however it will only be a very very small amount because this marking gauge is only overhanging very very small amount so back to the marking out so the Veritas marking gauge is set to the width of the ash here and what I'm going to do is transfer this marking gauge onto our pin board now what's worth met with the pin board is that you only need to mark it front and back so with marking gauges this what a lot of my students will struggle with what you want to be doing with this is focusing more on pressing it into the end grain of the timber rather than pressing down into the surface just do really light scores to start with and gradually increase that pressure you don't need to make them too deep because if your chisel is sharp it will locate it in that line even if it is extremely faint but for the purposes of this I'm going to do them quite heavy so you can see what I'm doing so there it is on the front and I'm gonna do it on the back as well now in my previous joint videos I mentioned that you should mark sholde lines with a square but with dovetails I always do them with a marking gauge this because I always make sure that that end grain is perfectly square whether that's been cut off a panel saw or if it's been cut off a shooting board the squareness this is extremely accurate therefore I can warrant referencing off it to mark my shoulder lines the other reason in all honesty is because my largest square that sort of reaches over this distance isn't actually that square so I can't rely on it and things like this so and I'll use a marking gauge with dovetails but anyway there you go shoulder line mark front marks back you don't need to do the sides on the pins so we're going to do exactly the same for the tails now so I'm going to get my type mark mark engaged now if you want to know the difference between these two marking gauges I did a tall jewel between them they're very similar but there are some differences that you should be aware of the link is up in the top right corner so did I set this marking gauge exactly as I did with the Veritas one so leave it overhanging a tiny tiny amount right there you go lock it down and I'm going to transfer this onto the tail side so I'm just gonna make sure he's going together the right way yep so what it's gone to here so these again press really hard into the end grain here and just do light pressure to start with get that line established because a lot of people with dovetails the thing they really struggle with is getting this shoulder line crisp this is usually where you'll see all of the gaps of beginners because they haven't taken the time to mark this accurately so front back light pressure to start with gradually increase that pressure now on the back here what I want you to do is dig the mark engaging quite a bit more than the front still keep it nice and accurate still keep the pressure on the end grain but make this line a little bit deeper than what you would on the other ones so then we're just going to do the sides quickly okay where we get shoulder lines are all marked out so the next thing we can do is start marking out the tail spacing so to the vise okay so to lay out the spacing the tails as I said at the start you have a couple of options to this on the end of this we're going to put three - yeah three tails on the end of that I reckon so obvious option is a ruler say you marking I don't know five millimeters from each side or just under a quarter of an inch marking five mil and then work out your spacing at the dovetails between that so a ruler works pretty well for that especially if you're working to a drawing for example however if you're not working to a drawing and you can't be bothered to do some basic maths which is me in a lot of cases nowadays you can use some dividers for it so I'm going to show you that method now firstly what you want to do is work out the size of the half pins either side of the tails so like I said with the ruler measuring in five millimeters we can do exactly the same with these so make it about five mil that looks about right that's what we're going to do is get the compass on the corner like that and then bring the other point down and stab it in give us a little point to work to so I'll just draw that one so you can see it got a little point around there we're gonna do exactly the same from the other side to get them to find a right on the corner like that and bring the other one down stab it in place then we got a mark there as well now this the bit I like what we're going to do is just sort of guess the size of the tails this way you're taking out the mathematics aspect of it happy days so they never be that big baby so what we're gonna do is start the from the dividers in that first point there what will you answer today we're not going to stab this other one in we're just gonna walk it along so pop it in that point and then we're going to walk it along hopefully three times one two I've completely overdone that that's rubbish right let's start again all right one two three right so that hasn't quite reached that other point so what we're aiming to do here is actually for that to overstep it so I'm gonna open up a little bit more now obviously whatever that distance is that I was short by so in this case about five millimeters I'm doing three steps so whatever change I make to these dividers it's going to be multiplied by three so I don't really need to do it by that much maybe about a mil or two so there you go start again one two three there you go so now you see it's landed spotting in there and what this means is when we come to mark out our dovetails we would get a spacing that looks similar to this dovetail guide I got from Berner Bill's burry when I was on the anarchist tool chest course you see it's literally the width of a saw cut between the tails some people like doing this because it shows that the dovetails were truly hand cut because you cannot do that with a router bit imagine a shank that big that would just be terrifying but yeah shows that the joint is completely hand cut and that there is no machines involved with it I think it looks good in this case but it's not usually an aesthetic that I'd go for so I like to leave about three or four mil between my tails so because I was spot-on with that other one are you open these by about a millimeter or so and then by the time I've walked three times it's going to multiply that by three and I should overstep this by about three millimeters now so one two three oh yeah I like that so whatever this oversteps it by that is going to be the distance between your tails that looks pretty good to me so I'm going to start again and this time I'm going to dig the compasses in a little bit so one dig it in spin it round to dig it in and three don't dig it in there what you want to do is reset the compass to this one and go back the other way so one two as you can see we got a mark there there there there and if I now square these across you can see that we've got our five millimeter spacing on the side we've got three tails and these bits in between are our waste so that's the method I tend to go for nowadays because like I say it means no maths which I really like however if I'm working specifically to a drawing I will still use a ruler so next thing to do is Mark out the angles on there so it's Mark out these dovetail angles this is where you have one of three choices firstly you could buy yourself obviously a dovetail guide so these are a fixed angle you just trace around that and you can actually do that across the endgrain as well and obviously this is quite a quick method another option here is to use some sort of dovetail guide and not even bother marking out the tails here you can just plot that on top shelf you saw up against it and these magnets will guide your saw all the way through I'll be showing you this in use later on this is the cat's Moses dovetail guide I had to play around with it earlier and I very much liked it so I'll be showing you that later the other option is using a sliding bevel so this is kind of like an adjustable square you can simply unlock it choose the angle you want and then mark down for the end grain like that the question is what angle do you look that well I will show you that now so if those lines all squared across the top the next thing we need to do now is obviously draw dovetails on the front here and we do this using ratios so for the purpose of this demonstration I'm going to do a one-in-six so firstly what going to do is pop a small mark on the bottom of this MDF here not drawing it on my bench don't worry so a small mark on the MDF and we're going to mark one unit across from that so I'm going to do both metric and imperial here I'm going to do 25 millimeters across which is also one inch and then what I'm going to do is get a square on the edge get my ruler and then I'm just going to square that line all the way up like this so for a one-in-six ratio we have gone one inch across now we just need to go six inches up so six inches is also 150 millimetres conveniently the length of this bit of MDF and we can join them up like that and we now have a 1 in 6 ratio so this is exactly the same if you do 1 meter across and 6 meters up one mile across 6 miles up it's going to give you exactly the same ratio don't we need to do is get our sliding bevel hooked over the edge of the MDF and line it up with that ratio lock it down and there we go one in 6 ratio locked into our sliding bevel so that works exactly the same if it's 1 in 8 1 in 7 1 in 5 1 in 4 whatever you want to do just measure one unit across and whatever you want up as long as you're using the same units of measurement and now with our one in sixth of tail ratio locked in we can simply join those lines up with the lines on the endgrain my Jesus Pen has started running out guys I need to get a new one I'm sorry I'm using a pencil for this now just take your time with this the marking out is arguably the most important bit of dovetailing because there's no point working accurately to inaccurate lines because obviously that's still going to be inaccurate what I'm gonna do now is just mark the waste I know what size of those lines I'm actually going to be cutting out again it's very easy to do especially as a beginner or someone with my level experience if I'm doing loads of draws for example it's still very easy to cut out the wrong line speaking of let's get cutting these out so to cut these out you could do exactly as I said in my video how to saw the link is up here for that watching that you'll get some great tips for cutting these dovetails so what I'm going to do is start on the back edge just nibble away at that line I've got my saw already angle to match the angle at the dovetail I've blown away the waste as it's created [Music] and then that line is perfectly established square across the timber and then once I've done that I can just continue it on down to the baseline no say at this point don't cut through the baseline because again it's what a lot of beginners do they think I'm cutting a dovetail they get completely carried away and then they cut below that shoulder line and you get a nice I'll gap there so don't do that it's not great obviously just get as close as you dare that looks pretty good to me so you could do that all the way along I would suggest working on the right hand side the tails and then the left hand side the tails or vice versa just do all the same side and then all of the opposite sides in one go so then you'll start reinforcing your muscle memory okay so before going any further with cutting the tails on these I wanted to highlight the use of dovetail guides now I've got two here these were sent to me by Jonathan Katz Moses of Katz Moses woodworking and what these will do is really help you with the soaring with dovetailing now how do they do this you might ask well they are magnetic now these are made from solid urethane which is the same material they make pull balls from so I would tap up my workbench to sort of show that but I'm worried it might dent it quite considerably so yeah these are pretty hard wearing bits of kit they're also clear so when you put them on the top of your component you can still see if you're cutting on the right side of the line because like I said earlier it's very easy not to do that so I'm gonna show you these in use I will be doing a tool duel between these dovetail guides and the David baron dovetail guide in the near future so if that's available the link will be up here if not I've just done some weird wavy stuff with my hand that doesn't link to anything be anyway let's see these in use so this guide I've got four phases I can reference on I'm using the tails here at the moment so you might be I'll see that there so that just goes on like that I'm gonna put it up against the pencil line that I've got on the endgrain I'm going to use a Japanese saw for this because that's generally what works better and then once it's all locked in place just pull back and watch this follow the line all the way down completely accurately one laugh so that has tracked it down perfectly I'll do another one here so guys right up against that line pop the saw on and then just start K you see how solidly along the top here that this saw is locked into me it's not budging side to side whatsoever you do need to put a little bit of effort in in your part but the guide really does help with this now you gotta do flip the guide rounds and go from the other side now the camera is in the way now so M move so before going any further with this I wanted to stress the importance of how important it is that these are cut perfectly square across the an grain the angle down the front here if the dovetails isn't actually that important that's mainly there for aesthetics however if these are not square it means that when you come to put the corresponding pin board into that if these tails will wedge shape for example it would mean that it would split the pin board below the shoulder line so not ideal obviously similarly if it was wedged this way obviously you're going to get some horrible gaps down the front here so really really important that these are square across the endgrain so like I said you've got a couple of options that you'd have to do it the way I showed you my video how to saw correctly put in the time effort and practice and you'll eventually be able to get that perfectly square or grab yourself some sort of magnetic dovetail guide like this they're not only good at giving you repeatable results down the front here but more importantly for giving you a square cut across the end grain and another instance to use dovetail guides is if you perhaps dovetailing a really nice component or a nice bit of timber for example that you couldn't afford to mess up having one of these would be like your insurance I suppose means that you're less likely to get something wrong with it obviously so anyway now let's get clearing this waste out so for clearing out the waste between these dovetails I'm going to use the new concepts fret saw some people will tell you to chisel in from both sides and just hack that waste out I have no idea why people do that it takes so long it absolutely mushes the end grain between the joints I really struggled to see a reason for it but people do it so each their own but this is the method I use so the advantage of the fret saw over a coping saw is that the blade is thins are able to get it down really fine cuts like this where as a coping saw blade is generally a lot thicker and it's difficult to get down saw cuts like this so because it's so thin I can actually put it down just do a couple of drags back and forth and I'll be able to turn it so it's not removed now I can just flip it round and take that other bit get this close to the baseline as you dare here about a millimeter or so we'll do that done so now let's cut these ends off so with the tails we put the marking gauge around all four sides so I've got a little line here that I can work to the cat's emergence dovetail guide also has a shoulder section which is on the opposite side to the dovetail section so I can literally put that on there put my sore against it and just start cutting down now with these shoulders I like to chisel them down at the end I don't like to leave them off the saw because it's an ingrained joint and I don't really like that being fluffy so I'll show you how you can do that this guide just simply put it up to that line overhang it by one millimeter soar up to it and just start cutting down then you can start bending your sore here to see if you can ping that last bit wait for it wait for it yeah there we go now if you're looking close there you can see it is about a millimeter off from the shoulder line which makes cleanup a lot easier later on so like so start you also have the option to use a crosscut saw with this and this is where you would use it because we're cutting across the grain here so if you were to do this freehand start on the back edge nibble away the back levy out the saw and then take it down to that cut line you can easily ping this last bit of material a little bit better with the Veritas there we go we're cut about a millimeter away from that shoulder line so again putting the time effort and work and you'll be able to do that like I just did freehand with the saw if not grab yourself one of the dovetail guides and just do it with the shoulder section on that so next what we're going to do is chisel down to our base lines so when chiseling out these tails there are obviously a few methods of doing it you can clamp it up right in the voice and go through like that or alternatively you could have it flat on the surface and go down like this now the last way is generally my choice with it I'm going to show you how I go about that now so cockadooters clamp this between my dog's here you notice how I'm clamping it with the tails off to the right or the left either way the most important thing here is that I'm slightly down the base line on this along its length that way when it comes to chiseling down to that base line I can see if that chisel is going in square or under cutting or over cutting virtually you can see if it's going in square whereas if timber was plant towards you like this you can't really see the angle of that chisel very easily so I would recommend clamping it sideways like this and this the same reason why I don't it upright in a vise like that you can't really see the angle that you chisels going in also if you were chiseling down to that base line using a mallet you lose a lot of energy transfer because that is slightly deflecting in the vise whereas if you have it down on a solid work bench all of the energy is transferred into the work bench and you lose a lot less power so let's get chiseling it down so I'm in close so as I said at the start this is usually where beginners will make an absolute dogs dinner of their dovetails getting this shoulder line right is usually the difference between if your dovetail looks or if it looks like hobos 2 front teeth or 3 front teeth in this case so what you want to do get the widest chisel that you can possibly fit between those dovetails so this one's right on the limit I'm not entirely sure I want to go with that I'm gonna drop it to my quarter inch and do it in two steps because the corner of the bevel edge here it can possibly bruise the internal corner of the tails if the chisel is slightly too big to fit in that cavity so usually best to do it in two chops or so the other thing to look at here is if your saw cut has gone all the way to the base line if it hasn't just reference your chisel off that inside face and then just simply roll it up until your chisel hits the base line or just goes a tiny bit beyond it and this means that those internal corners in there will be really crisp once the joint is all assembled together so there we go now we can start chopping now what I've got here is about two millimeters of material between the shoulder line and where I cut with my fret saw and what you don't want to be doing here is pumping your chisel straight into that line and whacking down to it because what will happen is the wedging action the chisel is going to push the chisel back and it's gonna fall below the shoulder line and give you a gap once the joint is assembled so this is usually what beginners do they'll put it in there whack it through and then wonder why they're always getting a horrible joint between the shoulder line there it's because you're trying to take off too much at once so what I generally advise here is keep holding the material until you can't have it any more so we've got about two millimeters left I'm gonna have that material and leave it so we have about one millimeter left get the chisel in there so it's looking pretty square and till about halfway and then just do the other side now we've got a millimeter left I reckon we can have that again take it down to a half a millimeter again only tapping it through to halfway and just do this second bit now and now we're about half a millimeter away from that line so if I try and half that again it's probably just gonna crumble so I usually say half a millimeter is about as close you need to get and now chisel into that shoulder line that we scratched on with the marking gauge get the chisel square and what I'm gonna do here is do taps and I'm gonna slightly undercut this now and you'll see the benefit of that later but what I'm going to do is after those two initial taps I'm simply going to angle the chisel out a tiny bit and put a small dip in the end grain at the end of the day an undercut is an undercut you don't need to start tilting the chisel all the way over like this it just needs to be like half a degree or one degree or so that is enough so two taps in straight slightly undercut halfway I'm going to do exactly the same here for this of a bit 1/2 inch square slight undercut there we go so now we'll do the same for this component got about 2 millimeters left so smack it through halfway now chisel in the base line to tap straight slight undercut halfway then there we go that's how you get a nice crisp sholde line between the tails and so now once you've done that side simply flip it over and do exactly the same on the opposite side so again if the saw hasn't quite reached the base line just get your chisel in there roll it up hit the base line and then start hacking out with materials to take away halfway halfway and then once you're about half a millimeter away from the base line chiseling the shoulder line do a few taps square like that and then slightly undercut it to match the opposite side then we go it will through on both sides so now what we got to do is focus on these outer corners so back to the vise so these outer part the tails is where you've got to be very very careful because on these internal ones you only really see one of the faces you have got two sides to it but generally this is the inside of the draw if you look inside the draw you'll be able to see any gaps here but in most cases you'll be looking at the gaps on the outside so beyond these ones on the face idea however on the edges here if we don't cut these correctly you'll be able to see a gap on the front and you'll be able to see a gap on the top and in most cases you'll be able to see a gap on the inside as well so you've got three faces here that you need to pay attention to as opposed to the two in the middle so you've got a few different ways of doing this you could clamp it up right in the vise like this and then you get a chisel in from either side angle your chisel down and pair upwards from all three sides and then that will create a small peak in the middle here and then you can simply come in from the side and pair that peak down until you get to the shoulder and all three sides the way I like to do it is get it in the vise sideways like this and then simply get my chisel into the shoulder line here and then hammer it down following this line on the front I find that I get much better results from that so if you get in close you can watch me do that so same as before we don't want to be smashing straight as that shoulder line like an absolute barbarian we want to have the material if we can so I left about a millimeter off from the saw I'm gonna have it and take it to about a half a millimeter away from the line so get it in there a few times yep so I still preserved the shoulder line at the top here and now I've taken away that tiny bit of material it means that my chisel has less chance of being pushed back into the shoulder so in the shoulder line like that and now you can't see it but I'm down on one knee and I'm really focusing on that show line down the front there there you go so that's taking it off nicely now I can just come in from the opposite way and remove that little nibbly bit there so it's coming from the front side and remove those little bits in the corner and there we go we've got a nice crisp line and obviously I started it in the shoulder line here so I know that's accurate and I followed it all the way down and if I look on the shoulder line here I can see that there is a really really thin white line all the way around and that is left over from my marking gauge like that it marks the shoulders with initially and so now while it's upright and the vise just use this opportunity to get any sort of horrible fluffy bits out the corners because that's going to stop your joint from going together as well being careful not to damage the internal corners of these tails this is the closest thing to surgery you will ever get if you're not a surgeon already that is then yeah you're probably pretty close to surgery by that point but anyway I'm chatting complete rubbish aren't I so there we go that is most the fluff removed another thing I like to do is just get my knife in there and just score into the corners a few times and that will get rid of most the remaining debris and there we go I reckon we're ready to mark this onto a pin board now so let's get that set up so you might remember at the start of this video when we were marking the shoulder lines on here I said to make the back shoulder line on the tails a little bit heavier and this is why what I'm going to do is get a chisel and I'm going to start about three millimeters back from that shoulder line I'm going to angle the chisel up and I'm going to slowly wiggle it in and take out the v-groove until it hits that shoulder line you'll get a nice little click and then you can remove that material I'll do exactly the same on the back of this tail as well choke up on the chisel when you're doing this if you're holding it by hand so then you're not gonna slip and make your hand look like a ham sandwich so and finally on the back of here and do make sure you are doing this on the back of the tails not the front because this will absolutely ruin your work otherwise and so now what we can do is we can get our pin board and our tail board oversleeps and face eyes and face hedges go in the same way get a pin board clamped in the vise and get away bit of material supporting it from behind and what you might be tense do is get this material the same height as this pinboard don't do that leave this pinboard about a millimeter or two above that lock it in place slide this back and then this is what the little V groove will do if I slide it forward you might be able to hear that that V groove is allowing this tail block to lock itself in place exactly on that shoulder line it's only a very very small amount of location but it's enough to hold it in there and to let you know that you're holding these tails in the correct place so get that located on there the next thing you can do is get a wide chisel reference it off your face side and face edge and then slide that block up and then you have two points of location it's not only gonna meet up perfectly on the internal shoulder lines here but it's also going to be flush on the face side and the face edge which is always good so there we go I've got that flush and now all I'm gonna do is get a marking knife and very very carefully mark around these tails now same as with the marking gauges do a light cut to start with and then gradually increase the pressure do not let this tail board move because that will mean that these knife lines are inaccurate in some ways the methods that I just showed you to locate the tails onto the pin board by cutting the V groove and by lining it up on the face edge will help you align it again but it's never gonna be spot on it's always best to be able to do it in one operation but we'll make mistakes sometimes so if it slips just go through exact same process as I just did so there we go I've got an exact template of the tails on here marks on the ends my pin balls so now I can simply move that up and square those lines down the front so I can easily see them I must say I am very much missing Jesus this pencil isn't quite doing it for me so we go there all squared down and of course before you do anything mark your waist because now if you cut the wrong side of the lines you're gonna have to start this pin board again and this is some lovely walnut so I don't really want to put that to waste so scribble across the front scribble across the end grain and hopefully I'm not going to cut the wrong side the lines now so to cut these out I'm going to show you a few different methods as well if you use the cat's modus dovetail guide mostly the slope of this section here is able to cut your tails however what you can also do with it is cut the pins because this stem on the bottom here is a dovetail shape as you can see here six to one which is what I've cut these dovetails too so I can either put that on here to cut the right-hand side or I can flip it round and that will do the left-hand side now with these tails if you remember it was this one here that a cut freehand so if I translate that onto here this line here it wasn't cut with the cat's modes of stuff they'll go so I won't be able to use that as a reference on here because my soaring won't be exactly the same as this guide however for all five of these other ones I can use the guide but for the purposes of this I'm just going to use it for this middle death sale and cut out both walls of that and we'll see what sort of result we get so here we go start with this line closest to me thumb on the back edge get it located blow away the waste as it's created now I mentioned how important it is that the end grain on the tails is perfectly square it's also important that these are cut down perfectly square as well because similarly with the tails if the pin sockets are wedge-shaped when I go to smash these in even if these are square it's still going to wedge it apart so the pins are the hard a bit because you've got to get this line along the top spot on and you've got to get this line down the front spot on as well so again watch my video on how to saw and that will give you a few tips on how to go about that so I'll just continue on with what I was doing okay and katsumoto's go for the middle one so get it matched up on there I'm going to stick the sorter at first I'm going to slide that up to the line ups going to take a small needle out the back to check where I'm at with it I think we can get a little bit closer than that so hold it in place and let the jig do the work now flip it over and do the other side it's worth saying this jig that you don't need to use it with the Japanese saw bit in most cases with dovetail guides using a Japanese saw like this is much easier same as before get in there with your fret saw and just hack out this waste here that's worth mentioning that be sure to angle your saw to match the angle of the pin here it's quite easy to keep it straight and start cutting into the back edge of that so just be aware of that okay let's get chiseling so same thing as before here widest chisel that you can fit between the gaps without hitting either of those edges and keep having the material before you commit to that final shoulder line don't go in and just completely whack it because it's gonna look terrible so again about two millimeters left take it down to one mil obviously again I'm sighting down this line here so I can see if much it will just stand on the pins oh so I can see if my chisel is tilting forwards or backwards or undercutting or overcutting whatever it is and if you work in from the face side on this component just be aware that you are tripping it into a wedge-shaped cavity so try and keep that chisel central in the socket for now to avoid damaging the internal walls of these pins we can clean that up later and advise zones gonna keep this central so we're in the show line now one two taps slight undercut so halfway all right so that sides all done let's just flip it over so on the back here I can see that the saw hasn't quite hit the shoulder line so I'm just gonna roll the chisel up and complete that I just want to do this for insurance purposes right so we chop down to the short lines let's get it up in the vise now and clean out the corners so this was what I meant about chiseling into a wedge cavity cuz obviously as I was going down my chisel fits in perfectly there but as it gets to the back edge it's not able to fit all the way through so if I try to whack it too much then I'll see it's just going to damage these internal pins so get a smaller chisel upright in the vise and finish off these internal corners upright like this doesn't need a lot of work there you go I think that's the front all done let's just flip it around okay again it's looking pretty good so now I'm just gonna get a knife into the corners and make sure there's no fluffy bits in there that's gonna stop it from bottoming out so before whacking this together as tempting as it is do a few checks beforehand to make sure that that is actually a sensible idea the main one you want to be doing is checking that the shoulder lines are square or are slightly undercut so what I'm gonna do is get a square in there and check that it's hitting both the front and the back baseline and this is where the undercut that we did will become prominent the outer shoulder lines of this joint will touch the square however the middle or not and the reason we do the undercut is so it prevents a little peak from being formed in between the shoulder lines and stopping this square from bottoming out in there once the joint is assembled that undercut will never ever be seen so it doesn't really matter but like so you don't have to go completely over the top of the undercut just a degree or half a degree whatever will do will suffice whatever the tails are all good I'm just gonna check the pins as well that's good there that's good good good good good so now just check for any fluffy bits in the corners again because once you get these under the lights quite easy for you to see them so just get rid of everything you can see in there and try and make it as clean as possible so as you can see I like to do this in one marking knife and kind of just pick it out and same in here as well just look okay so that looks good the next thing we're gonna do is put a small leading edge on the back of all these tails so get in close it so we're gonna do here on the back of the tail so this the face side being the front on the back is put the leading edge and all that is is just a small chamfer on the back of each tail which is going to help it locate in the pin socket now what you don't want to do is start the sham foot all the way from the end green because that is gonna show on the finished joint instead start about five millimeters or just under a quarter of an inch and just put a small chamfer on the back like that really doesn't have to be that big just something to help these tails locate in the pins and also if we have any rubbish in the corner of the pins this chamfer will bridge the gap over that so eliminate another possibility of the tails not bottoming out in there so just referencing the chisel off the shoulder line take off the little ears that have been left over there we go so I'm just noticed here on the second pin in from the right that I haven't got as close to the line as I wanted to when soaring I think I could probably do with pairing it back a little bit so what it's tempting to do here is pop your chisel in the end grain and smash it through but what that's going to do is to track the grain down the front here and you don't know if you're going to get that perfect square or not so as tempting as it is your best bet is to go in from the front now I generally lower the chisel like this press in with my thumb on the opposite side and they just roll it up to hit that line along the top and then pair through from the sides it's being really controlled with it while I'm here there's its hiney bit at the back here that probably would have compressed but I don't want to risk it splitting because when you hammer these together these parts here are at most risk of splitting so these outer ones you want to be pretty precise with okay has this three hours of filming be worth it they're locating in there to start with which is a good start that's the little shampoo that we just put on the back edge and it shows that our tails are a pretty good fit obviously so let's start tapping it down well it's me that looks pretty good so let's clean it up and see what we got [Music] and there we go guys that is how you cut a dovetail joint entirely by hand with no machines whatsoever so if you haven't already be sure to check out the Katz Moses dovetail guide I'll put a link in the description maybe a card up here as well if I'm feeling generous ever have enough left something like this would be great for beginners who are really struggling with soaring for example I mean the result I've got on this middle tail here is brilliant there is absolutely nothing wrong with it the angles on the perfect and it was very easy to do as well so the link for that is in the description I will also be doing a video covering the extra features this little guide has as well so keep an eye out for that but why I always say with dovetailing guys is mark out precisely take your time with it if he saw rings off it really doesn't matter just chisel back to those lines and trust that those lines are right if you take the time to mark them accurately they will be right if you mark them wrong then there's no point working to them accurately because honestly you're just gonna get gaps everywhere so take your time with the marking out work back to those lines and you'll get a lovely joint like this no glue as well so there we go I hope you found that useful of see traffic comments below if you have any further questions I'm sure there's going to be a lot in this topic and yeah I will see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Matt Estlea

Views: 1,708,115

Rating: 4.8534479 out of 5

Keywords: how to cut a dovetail by hand, woodworking, woodwork, dovetail joint, through dovetail, hand tool woodworking, hand cut dovetail, dovetail joint with hand tools, woodwork by hand, dovetail, dovetail tutorial, through dovetail joint by hand, beginner woodworking joints, intermediate woodworking joints, dovetailing tips, how to improve dovetails, katz-moses guide, how to dovetail corners, how to make dovetail joints, how to dovetail joint by hand, how to dovetail wood, matt estlea

Id: 2hP-QAAhpxQ

Length: 39min 38sec (2378 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 23 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/jillanco]

He’s fairly popular-why do you call him a small YouTuber? I agree he deserves more of a following though. He’s extremely good at teaching and editing, and his approach is very reasonable and no-nonsense.