How to Make Small Dovetail Boxes | Episode 1 | Paul Sellers

I think sometimes when you know when I start talking about dovetails a cloud comes over the eyes of my students just for a moment and because they are not sure they're a bit intimidated by box making and especially hand cutting their dovetails so I've got some boxes here that might look a little complicated this is a box I use for my files it's exactly the same as this one which is a pencil box for pencils and it's got a single dovetail in here it's got some details on the top here that we put on with a screw in a block of wood here's another one this is a chisel box that I keep chisels in now it's these are new projects that I've just made but I've been making them actually for a long time but I thought this would be a great phase for you to get started in your dovetail making and then so I like the box because it fits on the bench I've got my chisels where I need them and this one was made from oak with mahogany and it's really a nice a nice project but before we get to the hardwoods and the fitted lid I'd like to go through this this one with you I'd like to show you how to make this chisel box this holds five chisels and you can vary the size you can vary the the width of the box but you can't go too wide if you're going to put a solid wood bottom on it which we have so you would make maybe two of these if you had more than five chisels five chisels seems to take care of most of my daily needs so I go from quarter of an inch to one inch and five chisels will fit in this box generally if the handles are about about the same size diameter as these are so what we're going to do is start by cutting our wood to size the length of this box is 12 and 3/4 the width is five and a quarter let me make a note five and a quarter 12 and three quarters and the depth from top to bottom is 2 inches you can vary the sizes you can vary the depth but this is going to be a single dovetail in each corner on this one after we've done this one we'll progress to this one which has a single dovetail and a single dovetail here but we've allowed for the use of a groove in here and I'm going to show you how to plow the groove and I'm going to show you another method which requires just a few hand tools rather than a plow if you don't have a plow so this one has the sliding lid so we've made an allowance for that and I'll be showing you how to get through that so we'll set those aside for now and get back to them later so you've got the sizes the bottom overhangs about quarter of an inch on each side and from end to end so that'll be half an inch longer so your box is 12 and 3/4 so the bottom will be 13 and a quarter inches and the width of it will be 5 and 3/4 so this is how I get started I've got my wood mill down to size so I already have cut this to a half inch by 2 inch piece I haven't cut to length yet so we'll go through that with you I'm looking at the grain I've cut a couple of pieces because I want to look at the grain examine the grain I'm looking at this surface fiber here you I don't think you'll be able to see this but I can see that when this was machined it tore a little bit in this end grain so I'm examining this to see which direction I should plane it if I plane it this way it's going to tear if I plane it this way it won't tear and I'll get a super smooth surface so what I'm going to start by doing is planing my surfaces so I'm trying to read the grain to make sure I minimize the risk of any tear-out so I'm looking at the grain this is a little bit awkward because it's not really telling me exactly which direction to plane I can clamp this in the vise or I can clamp it on the bench top I'm going to clump in the vise starting at the end where I start my planing when you start planing hand planing with a with a bench plane generally we start at the farthest end away from us and we start working back in sequences towards the opposite end if we start at this end then we have all this wood in front of us and it's all compressing as we push so this gives us a short start here so I've set my plane shallow remember when you're setting your plane set it on a narrow piece of wood and see if you get an even shaving from both sides so my plane is set I'm taking off a shallow cut so I'm getting clean surface here no tear out move along just above the vise jaws like that a little bit more here it's flexing you see and I don't want it to flex away from me so remember to press down on the fore part of the plane here don't tilt this way there's a tendency especially when you begin planning to drop your hand here so press down on the fore part and push forward with this hand so it's down with this one forward with this one and into the cut so you get a nice smooth start to your plane surface of this surface I can't feel any undulation in it then I turn this and fore end like this that means I'm probably anticipating the right direction for the grain because it's going to be rising up this way if anyway so I'm working across the width with three four five strokes the surface is glistening for me here really I just love the way now I think I've picked the right direction so I'm moving backwards so still smooth no tear-out which is great confidence comes with practice so that's the the flat face is done now I'm looking at the grain again I can see some tear out from the machine the surface isn't really telling me what I feel like I need to know so I'm going to go in this way now I have a beam here so this isn't not it's not going to flex very much but I still start up at the the forepart move back with each successive stroke until I've got a long clean surface here then I go with one clean now look where my fingers are my fingers are like this on the plane I'm not bulldogging this down I'm here my finger my forefinger tucks under here that gives me the right vertical adjustment that I might need when I'm working the plane and see here just rest your fingers on the side so I'm pressing down with my finger my thumb really and I've got my finger trailing along the side of the plane and I just push forward and lean into the cut okay now this is likely to be square because it came from machine stock so I'm not necessarily anxious to test this this way because the chances are it will be square so now one thing I want to check is my width I want to be 2 inches so you could set a gauge or you could set this to two inches and just see if your machine stock if it was machine it's close all the way along this is great this is already working parallel if it wasn't then I might take her for shaving now I left this straight off the table saw to width now you may have hand cut yours if you've got a wider board we'll be showing you some things about that soon so I'm going to take the saw kerfs out start at the four part again and then work back with each stroke now I know I'm fairly level and I was parallel so I'm just gonna start taking shavings all the way through from one end to the other looking for the grain now here I heard there I felt it and I saw it I could tell the grain was I was planning against the grain so I turn around and planed from this end hands in the same position as I did the other edge until I get these continuous shavings we're only taking off two or three thousandth of an inch there with each stroke so I'm ready I have these beautiful crisp corners but I'm going to take them off now with one two three four strokes this is just a personal thing it makes it where I'm not going to get splinters from the corner nice crisp edges okay we now cut to length we've got to check the ends for square this is important if it's not dead square then we can trim it with the plane I'm square so we're 12 and 3/4 long on this take a pencil line just to get you in the ballpark now I'm going to go with my square I know this is all parallel I know it's square so I can use any edge I want to I put my knife mark right onto the pencil line and I make one light pass and then I make a second pass parallel to it which I guesstimate that that is going to be the width of the saw when it's passing into the cut I'm turning around now I'm going back to that first knife mark so I can drop in there and I can put the bruising into that waste wood this is the only reason I turn it round I don't want the bruising the part I'm going to keep I'll make a second pass here and I transfer the lines up onto the edge down onto this face onto this one these should if your square a square and your wood is parallel as this one is you should be able to get everything lining up exactly on those corners so I'm going back to do the second parallel line so this is a method that I developed purely for clean cross-cutting so I get a very similar finish to that which I might get with a chop saw power equipments but I've eliminated it from this because I think it's going to be more valuable to you especially if you're not able to access a machine or you want to do it by hand it's a simple device this is a piece of equipment that we use all the time really if we want to keep the bench free we want something to push against I like these holding my wood they'll push into the cut long even strokes full length of your saw gently let the saw do the cutting just the weight of your hand all the way through full length stroke you see what I got here on on both sides of this piece I've got I've got clean perfect lines here so I know this is dead square this is ready for the next cut on this on this one it's the same except I still have some of the knife wall more obvious on one piece than I do on the other so now I take this and I put this to the shooting board here take this end piece set it on here lying my plane down with a shallow setting and take a few shavings until I get exactly down to my knife wall this is not the only way to do this doesn't matter which side I go to this is dead square I can also put this into the vise and plane the endgrain this way but this takes a little practice so I'm recommending that you do the shooting board method unless you are well practiced with your plane I can also plane this way so what I'm doing is I'm going part way across like this looking at my knife wall and I'm lifting up before I get to this side so it doesn't tear and then I turn around this is much easier on a longer piece of wood or a wider piece of wood so I go this way and as long as your plane is sharpened properly and well set this will give you a beautiful clean line so I've got my first piece cut offer it against the second piece here flush the end and I can mark this just with a knife wall you know you just pull it like this listen and it just clicks into place slide your square up to it gently with this Pasco very gently and then you can go as heavily as you like after you've done that up onto the edge into the knife Nick this knife wall is so critical to the kind of accuracy we need for fine woodworking knife into the next slide up and gently with the first pass very gently then you're not twisting that square it's not pushing it on then the knife is sitting in that first furro that you cut check before you make the knife wall that this lines up on both sides which it should do gently and then heavily another way for cutting now I didn't use a second aspect to creating the knife wall which we do quite often we take up a wide chisel and chisel into this knife wall like this so just move this so i get a good grip I've gone lower in the vise on this side so this is elevated just a little bit that means I get a good firm grip with the vise and then I place my chisel about an eighth of an inch two or three mil from that knife wall and I just rocked the chisel like this move across and rock the chisel again move across and rock again and then I flick that and that gives me a step-down because this time I don't have two knife walls that the saw is slotting in between so I want to create that nice and firm lower here higher here so you can miss your bench with this and then just offer the saw right up against the knife wall go across get yourself in and then drop your hand a little bit and follow the vertical knife wall listen changes pitch the whole time listen so it's saying slow down as you get through again this is the underside remember so I got this perfect clean cut on both sides of this cut I don't have to do anything to this now because it's perfect if I planed it it wouldn't improve what I've got and I'm going to be planning out my dovetails later anyway so that's two pieces cut and then we cut the end pieces the same way all the pieces are cut to length and trimmed perfectly to the line that's a very important step and what I'm going to do now is just run, I've already picked which sides I want for my outside that's entirely up to you and what I do here is I just put my fingers on this outside edge here and flush this here and then I take my pencil right on the inside corner nice sharp point and just a single line and I do that on the end of every piece flush the ends like this so each and I do this to same on this one and then we can lay out the dovetails with the dovetail template and I will be using it over a dovetail template which simplifies everything and I'll explain some things about how we how we got to the dovetail template how we got the angles for the dovetails these pieces should be about the same thickness there may be some variance because we we hand planed them but don't worry about that variance at this point because we the method that will be following will get us to the exact depth we want the pencil line is always going to be a rough guideline it's not exact it's not like the knife wall so those are my pieces ready for placing the dovetails and the dovetails are going to go on the long pieces so we'll set these two pieces aside and and now we'll put the dove tool layout for the dovetail I'm just going to show you what I said there about the angles on the dovetails because this is important a lots of times people get confused about the angles for the dovetails we're going to use a one-in-seven pitch traditionally that varies a little bit sometimes they were a one-in-six pitch and sometimes they were a one-in-eight pitch today we've reached a compromise and we usually go with a one in seven so what we do is we set this sliding bevel or a tea bevel sometimes it's called this will give you the exact angle that you need but you have to have some kind of formula to establish that so what we do is we take a square square a line from the end if it doesn't matter if this is square we're just going to go from the end and we're going to square a line here like this and then we measure down seven inches from there so this gives us a one-in-seven pitch this is one inch wide but if yours may not be so measure one inch from here I usually just take this beam and put it on here and make a mark on this side then I join those two lines together like this that gives me the pitch that I want and then I set this sliding bevel to that pitch and it doesn't matter which direction it goes right up to the line tighten it up and that sets that so now I can flip this here and here and that gives me the right pitch that I need for laying out the dovetail so now we'll lay out the dovetails on the ends of the long pieces so to do that we're going to use the square and we're going to use this but I also want to introduce another tool and you can see this on one of our youtube videos we did this to camera so that you could make one yourself very simple very quick takes about 50 minutes to make one so but on one of these dovetails I'm just going to lay it out with the sliding bevel and the square so just in case that's all you have so measure from one end I think a steel rule will work better if you have one what I'm going to do is I'm going to measure in 3/8 of an inch from the corner I'm right on the corner I remember so I'm going to not not 3 3/8 quarter of an inch sorry quarter of an inch from either side right on the corner that's the exact position of the dovetail same on all the other edges so but what I do is I first square these lines these lines across the end like this then I take my other piece here clump these together in the vise and I use the first one to mark the second but this is an important step here I want to make sure that I have exact measurements so I go into my vise just for this is my third hand the vise is your third hand and I use my square across here just the same way as I just did right onto that pencil line and this is also going to be my cross reference to make sure that I'm accurate I do this with all of my dovetails and then I flip over this way to see if my lines line up and the edges line up here which they do so now I can take these end for end and I can mark them all off that same original line so I don't have I don't have to lay out more than once put this one in the vise and do the same like this and then turn it in firend and do the same on the other end so I'm I've got all my dove tail points laid out now I just have to lay out the actual angles like this now then this is where I want you to see how this this bevel works I slide this up here right on to the corner make sure that the stock of the sliding bevel is registered properly against that face and I pull this line down here and turn it around then do the same right in here but if I was using my template I have everything in one this end is a square here it's very useful this one is square this one has the angle and this one has the angle in the opposite direction so I can use the square across the top here to lay out my square lines then I can take this template slide up to my line on the top and Mark this in the same way this is much more efficient than than using the sliding bevel and then I'm ready to cut down these lines down to just above the depth line that's what we'll do now so you can see here we've got the dovetail's angle there and we have the square lines right on the end and that's ready for cutting a lot of times people want to put the line all the way around on to this side but I can't see that when I'm cutting so there's really not much point so I'll be cutting down to just above this line here when I saw down these cheeks I'm gonna put the lines on the other side just so you can see me cutting but normally I would not do this as part of my everyday work it's not really necessary for me so we'll cut those now so now I'm going to saw down these two lines down the cheeks at an angle and here I put my thumb on the side here just to guide the opening cut gently pushing the saw backwards and forwards but not down the most important thing is to leave this line in which I have and and that maintains the exact line square across which is most important then I saw down my angle trying to remain to the line not going drifting and I stopped about two mils above my depth line then I go in this side same again using my thumb to make sure it doesn't jump around then I saw down the angle blowing the dust away just to see exactly where I need to cut to and stopping just above the line those are the side walls of my dovetails cut nice and clean I can see the lines here on the ends and this was the back side which I said we don't even need to look at so here what we're going to do now is we're going to establish this shoulder line across here some people use a gauge to go across here I prefer not to so what we're going to do is we're going to use the first piece of wood I'm going to place my square onto near to the line I'm going to use this the piece of wood that's actually going to form the corner and slide my square up and I'm using my fingertips to flush it to that outside edge that gives me the exact position and here I can see that I've got a knife wall here I can see that distance between here and here that I want to keep I wanted that line because I wanted to keep a little bit on there so I'm just I'm using the knife to establish the knife wall I'm not doing the middle section so I've got my knife wall here and here I stand this on edge I can go directly into this slide up till my Square stops right against the very cutting edge and I make a wall here turn this flat I flip my square over so it's always registering against the same edge slide my knife into there slide my square up to the knife then I get my firm grip check that I'm still in that knife wall I go across this is the inside edge so I'm going on either side of the dovetail again and then right onto this one top edge here this is the cut line this has to be exact so this is what gives us the kind of accuracy we want so now we're going to chisel into this knife wall with a wider chisel you just place the chisel about 1/8 of an inch from that line and just rock it gently like this and then when I just flick this with my thumb it'll break off to the exact depth that I want we do the same on the opposite side but we don't need to do it on the faces we don't need to define those knife walls it'll go right onto this rim here just rock the chisel from side to side gently and then flick and that gives me a perfect recess into which I can now slide my dovetail saw and slide my saw across here so thumb again finger against the side usually I put my thumb right on this side and I just like those saw teeth just kiss the surface for a little while three or four short strokes until there's no gap between the plate of my saw and the end grain of the knife wall let the weight of the saw do the cutting listen to the sound same on the opposite side here I'm gonna push the plate against the against the knife wall here I'll keep my thumb there here against the side and this finger is pulling against the saw kerf just to minimize any vibration then I'll listen so I'm taking my hand away so it amplifies so the whole bench the saw kerf everything the sawing action becomes an amplifier now that left a very tiny amount of fiber right in this corner here from the two saw kerfs so I'm going to just chisel down this edge from the top first doesn't matter whether you do the top all the other first I just rock my chisel here then I bring my chisel in this way here that gives me a pristine inside corner same on this other edge you can see that in tight corner right I can see right in here there's a little step make sure it's tight in the vise and just chisel rock your chisel down the incline of the dovetail and you've got a nice crisp corner inside now there's one more step that we have that I can see and you may not be able to see around here is a slight rim where we have the end grain fibers and knife wall are slightly different but just a hair so I rest my chisel on the knife wall here and just rock it back and forth just move into the side of the dovetail so it's perfectly level right there that's all I need that's about a thousandth of an inch but that thousandth would show us a gap so I avoid all gaps and then I have to do the same from this side okay I've got exactly what I needed now clean inside corners I think you'll be able to see right inside here very clean pristine lines it's important it's not what you make but how you make it that's going to be important to you and the finish of your projects

Channel: Paul Sellers

Views: 213,093

Rating: 4.9504023 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, hand tools, paul sellers, dovetail, boxes, box

Id: SibYJ8JtOo4

Length: 36min 30sec (2190 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 02 2017