Jim Kingshott - Dovetails

[Music] this is my tool chest on made this back in the 1940s in the last year of my apprenticeship now all cabinet makers done that that was no exception you were allowed to go back after hours you weren't allowed to do it in Governor's time and make your tool chest and you were judged all your life as a cabinet maker you were judged on the quality of your chest so you were going to put your best bit in there now it's a marvelous thing is the tool chest it's evolved until it fulfills its purpose absolutely Ely perfectly the tools on the bench go in the chest at night you always clean your bench off last thing at night and they sit on the plane boards down here and of course during the day they're up on the planing strip on the bench underneath the plane boards are our bench planes that aren't in regular use our bench chisels are all close to hand the long pairing gares and chisels and then down under here we've got all our long tools our panel gauges and squaring rods long rules and so on and then the next one up we've got our sore till with all our bench saws and so on in and then over the back right at the bottom this would be full of course of molding ples most of my tools don't live in the chest anymore or they scattered around the workshop but the main reason for showing you this is not to show off what I want you to see is all these dovetails the whole of the chest is literally a mass of dovetails the till every till is all is held together by these the drawers all got lap up toils at the ends nice Oak sides lap Dove tailed into mahogany fronts and the tills look they slide on Oak this all really is to accommodate the wear and not only on the inside by tradition there was no Swank on the outside of the case whatsoever it was just painted flat paint even the handles were rope grommets but we've got Dove towels in the plinth even if it's moed at the top we've got it Dov toiled for strength the whole of the carcass is dovetailed lap dovetailed here and even the corners is lap dovetailed the whole idea of the dove toils was strength we needed strength don't forget this weighed a lot when it was full of tools and it had to be moved from job to job uh it lived at the end of the cabinet Maker's bench but of course he changed employer now all those dovetails and dovetails they're reputedly difficult to cut but they're not quite honestly it's hard to make a good Mort Cenna than it is a Dov tail I'll show you well here we are I said we talk about dovetails and here we got a straightforward lap dovetail joint nice big one so we can see all the features you can see the actual tail and of course it's obvious why it's called a dove tail it's the shape of a Dove's tail let's take that apart and we can really look at the various features there we are now we can really see the doveet tail now what are we going to call these angles slopes or pitch we call them the slope now that slope is a certain Optimum and angle to it in other words if it was too great The Grain would be very short what I'm saying is if we cut this side at that sort of angle this grain would be very very short and it would break out the joint wouldn't be very strong if we made it too shallow The Joint would pull apart so there's an Optimum angle to that so we make that slope normally I make mine one in seven but there's some people say that in softwood it should be one in six and in hardwood one in8 well I don't think that matters very much as long as it's sort of in that ballpark so that is the the actual parts of the tail now let's look at it in a little more detail here I've got a through doveet tail just two bits of wood doveet tail together here we've got some names to remember again we've got the Tails which are dovetail shape and the bits between them are called the pins and the N ones are obviously called the end pins but if you look carefully at this you'll see that we've got engrain on the Tails and we've got engrain on the pins so both faces have got ingrain showing this is fine for boxes and maybe the back of drawers and things but a lot of people don't want to see this engrain in fact on a lot of quality work engrain is considered obscene we don't want it probably the Pinnacle of dovetail joints looks like that it's a straight D straight monitor in appearance but in actual fact there we go it's a dovetail the secret dovetailed mited joint we've got tails and we've got pins and the whole Kaboodle goes together and we ID up all that hard work if you say doveet tals to most people what do they think about drawers so here's a drawer this comes out of my tool chest that we were looking at earlier on and we can see the features here we got a nice Oak Side tiled into the mahogany front we can see the tiles and we can see the pins but when we look at the draw front there's no ingrain we call that a lap dovetail and that's probably the most useful doveet tail to be able to make if you can make that you can certainly cut the through doveet tail that we've got on the back of the draw so what we'll do we'll look at draw making well okay so when we're making a box or a drawer it's rather important that we don't get the parts modeled up we've got four bits that are very very similar so if we stand these up here like that we can see what okay so all the face marks are in the right direction but how the hell do we know that that doesn't go there and that go there and what's more if we marked that out to go there and then we assembled it over here we would be in the stock so we need some way of keeping the parts in orientation and in the cabinet trade we've got a little conventional way of doing that we unroll the drawer and we mark it like this we put a little half circle on here and a half circle on there look at that okay and we call this one two two 3 3 four four and that's one again because it goes back to there like so and now whenever we pick this up and we've got to Mark something to it we can just put it on a half circle comes back with the same numbers and exactly the same from the other end no problem so we get rid of them scruffy little bits I'm going to have some nice wood how about this well there's the the drawer from my toolbox and we're going to talk about this corner here so this piece will be the draw front this nice piece of mahogany and here we've got a nice piece of Oak we usually make good quality Furniture as Oak drawer Linings because all the weight of the drawer keeps rubbing on here and Oak wears extremely well so that's that's where we're going we now need to set this out if this was a drawer it's about the only thing I can think of that you fit before you make it these sides would have been fitted into the carcass and the draw front would have been fitted in a perfect fit into the carcass well we've only got part of a drawer so we want to make sure that our ends here are absolutely Square so what we'll do we'll just shoot these up nice and tidy now I'm going to use my nice old mit plane but not everybody is lucky enough to have one of those but if you've got a block plane just an ordinary 9 and a half that that that that'll work on ingrain perfectly well but why should I use that when I've got something like this so there we are there we are shot nice and square look and exactly the same with this there we go that was painless wasn't it now just so that we don't get in a mle and I don't confuse you what we'll do we'll pretend it was a complete drawer and that was joint number two there we go that'll keep us in line we come again to to another strange tool this is one I had made for me I find working with a big cutting gauge like this rather clumsy and not as accurate as I'd like to be so this is Jim's own and you'll see why in a minute we need to set this up first and foremost to the thickness of the drawer side here we got the lining let's have it exactly right now you see why we've got an adjuster here that is a micro adjuster just like on a Engineers Veria caliper there we go that's exactly the draw th side thickness and the draw side is going to go into there so we need to mark that thickness if we Mark that thickness on there that is the amount of wood that's needed to be removed for that to go in nicely the next thing we've got to decide is how far we put those doveet Tails into the draw side in other words how thick is this lap going to be now we're going to break a rule here you always gauge at least that's what you're told from the face or the face Edge this time we're going to gauge from the back in other words we're going to gauge from this face across here the length of the dove tail um on this sort of work there is no rule um it it rather depends on the type of wood and the thickness of the draw front and various things like that from experience I'd say that that's a good length for the tail and up here we're going to just put a line and that line is the length that that's going in there now if we very gently we don't want a very deep line cuz you're weakening the Tails across there that is also the length of the dove Tails now what we need to do on this piece of wood we need to Mark some Tails out now we've got two tools that we can use there are various patterns of dovetail template the this pattern is always made by the Craftsman himself quite often out of wood but um I made mine out of perspects so that I can see through it it makes it much easier to position and you can see that this is the the actual slope this one in effect is about one in one in8 or you can buy a proprietary one made made by Richard Cal quite a nice little tool which goes on the end as you can see this is a 1 in8 slope you can set the width of the dove tail by these little screws and you can actually move the template from one side to the other this part is detachable and you can replace it with one that marks one in six for softwood but I prefer my homemade one so we take a pencil and let's first and foremost Mark our two end pins in other words that's one and that's the other one now you might not believe this but when you've been cutting doveet tails for a few years your Dove tail saw Falls automatically on that angle and you don't need to do this you can put it in the visce and do it without any setting out at all but um I'm not going to prove that to you we sharpen the Chisel Edge on a pencil here we go the pencil for setting out is all sharpened like a chisel and we keep it in trim by rubbing it on a piece of garet paper and keep that out the way cuz we don't want have black lid on the job now then we've got to divide this up into the number of of Tails we're going to put on there and if we look at this we've got something like what have we got we've got an inch an inch and 916 sorry 3 in and 9/16 to divide into four now that hurts the head done that and Woodworkers are never any good at maths so we have a little Dodge what we do we take the center of that end pin and bring a line down parallel there and then we put the rule across from the center of that end pin until we've got a measurement that we can divide easy well there you go four so let's put a tick at each inch there we go look and we can take them up to the end and that's the center of our pins take our gauge again a dovle template and we can Mark we can Mark her pins out now here we come to another arbitrary thing how what is the relationship in size between the pin and the dovetail in other words um are these little pins that I'm marking the ideal should they be that size or should they be the same size as the doveet Tails well carpenters and people that want to make things really strong say that if the pins are the same T size as the dove toils you've got Optimum strength but cabinet makers like little pins it looks neat and it looks tidy in fact on things like uh I and dressing mirrors that go on top of a chest of drawers you want little tiny winny baby pins and they just put the dove towel saw in and wiggle it about a bit that's the pin anyhow that's a that's a reasonable size and it's they're easy to cut I want to cut from the other side um in this so what I'm going to do I Square these lines over in other words these these these ends of the of the dove tail I'll square them down the end of the the draw draw lining uh you'll see why in a minute there we are all squared down nicely and I want to put those Tails back onto the other side so there we go I'll let you do a little secret I really love cutting dovetails it was about the fourth year of my apprenticeship the old Workshop Foreman said to me is there anything you haven't done much of Jim that you really fancy doing and I said I haven't done much St tailing he said well that's lucky cuz we got a fitment to make for barkless bank and it's got 50 drawers in it so I dve tailed 50 drawers I didn't fancy dtail in much after that for a while now I'm going to gauge if you remember we set this up this is the length of the doveet tail we set it up on the end of the drawer we've already got it in faint across the inside of the drawer but because we don't want a nasty gauge line across their tails when we cut it we're only going to actually mark we're going to Mark in between so that's the pin and we're going to cut the pins out remember on this so we Mark the pins like so and the pin there and then at the end there we go we need that on the end grain as well on the top of the drawer so we can see where to saw and the same there now I'm going to give you a tip most beginners sooner or later saw the wrong bit out so what I suggest you do is take a soft pencil or a bit of lumber crayon or something and actually Mark the bits you're going to cut out just to remind you when you got the saw in your hand and you get carried away with your exuberance that you don't s the wrong bit away cuz believe me it's most discomate and when you get to put the draw together and you find all you got left is pins everywhere so there we are that's what we're going to get rid of we we certainly wouldn't set all the draw sides out we can set one out and we can clamp all the draw sides together Square the lines over the top and saw them all in one foul swoop this one we're lucky we've only got one to sore so let's see what we can do the easiest way is to hold it vertically in the vice there we are and now we need to S down the sides of the Tails there's two tools for this there's the standard saw guess what it's called a duv tail saw that's the normal Western Tool or we can use a Japanese dauki nagori which is probably used by a lot of top cabinet makers now they're a gorgeous saw but we'll use the the Western saw today and here we go so we actual [Music] fact [Laughter] d I like to soore all the tails on one side first with the saw slope in one way and then come back the other way and you'll see in a minute that it doesn't matter if we've been a little bit inaccurate the main thing is to make sure that the saw is square across the JW but if you don't keep exactly on the line for the tail that doesn't matter very much at this stage well there we are now some people will tell you to hold this in advice so that the line on the side of the doveet tail is vertical because then you can saw nice and straight down and then you have to go the other way turn it up and S this that certainly isn't the way of the Craftsman if you can't so to a line doesn't matter what angle you ought to be practicing soaring not cutting D toils now we have to cut these pieces out of the pins now there's several ways of doing that some people put them on the bench on a piece of waste and chop them out with a chisel I'm not too keen on that I leave them in the vice and I'll take a I'll take a coping saw and I sore out the bulk of the the bulk of the pin there we are now we've got to true that up we need a piece of wood piece of scrapwood on the bench because we don't want to damage our bench now in Years Gone by cabet makers used to Stone the side the actual slope of a d of a ordinary bever Edge chisel in other words they take a beveled Edge chisel and they'd Stone this slope until it actually formed a sharp edge with the back of the Chisel because they've got to get in the corner well we don't do that anymore cuz our friends the Japanese actually had a dovetail chisel as one of their standard tools and it's a gorgeous little brute so we don't need to mess about any anym now what we've got to do we've got to come back to that point where we gauged our line and we want to go straight through the work I don't think we yes there it is now you'll notice that I'm tending to pair down in there out of upright in other words I'm sloping away from the line there's a very good reason for this which you'll see in a minute turn the job over see these nasty little Cuts they'd be in your bench top if you didn't use a pairing board and a lot of people don't bother I've always said that the cabinet Maker's bench is probably the most important tool and you certainly wouldn't dream of cutting into the top again I'm still pairing slightly away on a slope so there tends to be a a bump in the middle here but last of all I begin to pair down straight and I'll get rid of the bump and I can see that the Chisel now is making a cut from one side of the wood right through to the other now it's important that this is a nice straight clean cut from one side to the other it's doesn't want to have a bump in it in the middle and it certainly doesn't want to have a hollow in the middle because it relies a great deal on that being a nice flat fit for strength well there we go that's the intermediate pins cut out that leaves us these two pieces to cut off and we cut them off with the saw by putting it in the vice and taking the saw we just saw those end pieces [Music] [Music] out now it's very very important that having swn them out that this little piece here this corner quite often it gets left with a little piece of wood actually in the corner that will hold the joint off so we want to make sure that we got a beautiful clean sharp corner there and it's very very difficult to get in there it's it's it's a point that is most important this of course also applies right across the job in other words what I'm trying to do I'm trying to make sure that this is clean right through here right through the joint in those Corners I don't want the slightest little piece of wood left in there so there it is that's our draw side with the pins cut on it now we come to the draw front and we need to Mark those pins onto our draw front what we have is a problem in other words we have trouble seeing lines that are marked on ingrains of dark woods but what we can do we take a piece of ordinary chalk and if we rub it over over the end Grine and then get rid of any we've now got quite a reasonable marking surface now we need to Mark those onto this and if you remember I'll mark the line again so that it's very very clear for you if you remember that is the depth of the actual pins now what we do to mark that we put this piece in the vice and we take a tool or a block of wood and we come down to the height of it like that this moves back there then this goes on there notice the two the two and the half circle it's got to be the right piece of wood we're certainly not going to Mark the wrong ones we line the front of the dovetails the length of dovetails up with the line that we scribed from the back that's no great problem now we need to hold this some clever people hold it while they mark it I don't like that it's got a habit of moving so what I do I put a cramp on it I actually hold it like that and there it is nicely in position if it's not you can adjust it very very gently by just okay you want this piece here that the face edges want to be in perfect alignment if you're not sure you can you can put something across to to check but that is the exact position that the side is in to the front ready for marking now some books and instructors are tell you to mark that with a Tenon saw on the side of the Tails but you're left with the width of a sore cut mark on there and it's not at all accurate and what's more you've destroyed part of the drawer end that you want to fit against the Tails I have a special tool that I make for my itself this is just ground out of an old piece of hacka Blade it's sharpened to a point on and then sharpen both sides it's absolutely flat on the back and the reason for that is we've now got a right-handed marking knife and a left-handed marking knife in one tool and we use that to Mark these dovetails onto the end grain of the front and you'll see that being thin and flat it fits right against the doveet tail then we turn it over and because it's pointed it's left and right hand so now we need it the other hand to Mark the other side of the Tails there we are that's marked out and you can see our TFT Tails now do you remember before I said don't cut the wrong bit away when we were doing the Tails well we're going to cut the pins now so let's just shade that to remind us that that is the bit of wood we're going to cut out because it's not unknown for somebody to cut that bit out when they wanted that bit so there we are all nicely marked there we got on now what we've got to do is to square those back along the inside so that when we cut them we're nice and straight it's worth taking a bit of care doing this next bit because this is part of what affects the actual final fit of the joint there we are now of course we got to remove this piece of wood leaving this and it surrounds which means we can't saw the ho of that out but we can s heart which will give us a a good guide to um to work to with the Chisel so in actual fact what we're going to do is we have to S at an angle keep just inside the line remember the saw cut must be in the waist there we go this is a lot easier if you've got a vice that is a tail Vice on the bench and you can actually have the wood at an angle if it's in the in the front VI of a bench it has to be vertical and you find yourself working on your knees to get the handle of the sword down low enough there we go well there we are we've sewn in now we've got to remove this wood in the middle this is quite a delicate operation if you pair down take it in small bites but don't quite get to the the line where you mark the lap leave yourself a bit to clean out later on [Music] of course the one of the major secrets of this is that the Chisel has got to be really sharp it's that first cut that first cut at the front at the front of the tile was you're taking it out you've got nothing to stop the Chisel so you have to be very very careful you don't go down and cut into the lap you'll find that the the chiszle will drop into the line do you remember the the line we made across here this one we made with a cutting guide you'll find that the Chisel drops into that lovely at the end of the at the end of the tile as we cut it out it's funny most people consider when they first start thinking about cutting dve Tails particularly by hand they think it's such a long windy job but it's not it's surprising um of course you need to be a bit systematic in your work in other words you certainly wouldn't mark one drawer end and then cut that if you had a dozen drawers you'd Mark a dozen draw ends or a dozen drawers You' Mark 24 draw R sorry and then you'd work them all and get them all to the same stage moving forward all the time um course you've always got that old old problem and I've still got it and I must have cut thousands of Dov toils in my lifetime I'm still rather eager to put the two parts together to see how they fit and now as you can see we're beginning to come to those little Cuts now that really matter this is this is what we're doing now determines whether the joint's going to fit or not right now we need to clean that last little bit out this is where it gets really really delicate when we get to about this stage it becomes easier now to finish it back in the vice so we need to return that to its original position there we are and away we go we'll have a slightly different chisel for that and we can now cut down the grain now you'll see that uh Jim had a little whoopsie there look when we were pairing the other way in the old days I'd have got five and six for that um if you overrun a sar in a Morts in sorry the dove tail in um everything was done on the book there was a a set set sum of money for for each operation and if they could see any inaccuracies like that each one was six so if you weren't careful you ended up the end of the week owing the governor money there we are you can see what's happening be very careful now those nice fine lines that you put on with the with the marking knife when we Mark the Mark the dove Tails onto the end grain here they give us a really good indication and you'll find that the Chisel will drop into those marks so in actual fact you're cutting exactly on the mark natural fact you'll find a lot of people refer to these parts that were cutting out now as the sockets um in other words the bits where the tail dove tail goes in is called the socket now one of the points I I really must draw your attention to is just how sharp these tools are now of course I don't have to tell you that really the secret of all woodwork is absolutely Sharp Tools if they're not sharp you just can't cut accurately with them because what happens is the tool takes the path the least resistance and goes where you don't want it to go and in this case it's got to go exactly exactly where we require it to cut this is this is very very important that we do this part right there's no need to try and rush it I'll get quite a lot of pleasure out doing this so why Rush it's a nice quiet job the only thing is it's stooping over all the time like this makes my old back leg there we go we'll come back and give them a final a final touch up in a minute there we are well of course um I suppose you could say I've cheated a bit really because I've got a very nice piece of mild grain mahogany here and it's cutting beautiful if this was a nice curly piece of Walnut um it'll be a different story all together in fact if I had any air left I'd probably be tearing that out by now [Music] here we are the last one look now the grind's a bit different down this end I shouldn't have crowed quite so soon it's important to try and keep the tools vertical so you get a nice straight cut don't undercut if you can help it um this is an old Dodge is under cutting in fact there's a saying in the trade if you keep your back shoulders off your front shoulders always come up of of course they're really referring to Morts and tenons but it applies to nearly all joints um if you stop the parts that you can't see if you keep them with a lot of clearance the actual edges that are at the sight fit perfectly but um of course the joint's nowhere near as strong as it should be well now we need a different chisel I'll go back to the to the Japanese dovetail chisel that is triangular in section and I can get right into these these back Corners with that and it's important that they're nice and sharp and clean right to the bottom ah we're not we're not back to the line on this one quite we're still just off the line let's have a a morel off the side there we are that's better I think that'll do us so now just this final final clear up there's a a little a little tip in actual fact um for all all aging wood workers we all end up having to wear glasses and you'll find that when you go to the Opticians he checks your eyes and then he insists on giving you a pair of glasses for reading well you know um unfortunately they're not what's wanted for woodwork they tend to be just the wrong length in other words we don't we get closer to the work quite often than we do with the reading length and then quite often the other extrem is we're working farther away so you really need glasses that have two focal lengths so instead having reading glasses I have buy focals made for the bench and the top part are 30in focus and the bottom are a 10in focus and I've established that over about five pair of glasses now and that works fine for me and that is very important that we see properly when we're doing this sort of work well there we are that's the sock it's all cut out um I don't like that little bit I'm ashamed of that but never mind we'll get around that now we come back here we've got the Tils now we come to a bit that that worries a lot of amateur Woodworkers professionally we only ever put a dove toil together once you don't put it together and see if it fits and take it apart and mess about we glue it and we put it together and that's it it's not fitted but before we do that there's one little tip I'll give you you see these little sharp Corners down here on the doveet tail well when you put the the thing together they have a habit of breaking off and rolling up in the joint and stopping it coming together so with a very very sharp chisel just take that corner off just it's a minute little champer not a great big one just a m little champer because if you don't take that off it'll roll off as you put the joint together takes a lot of control of the tool just to take the amount you want it's not a bad idea at the very end just to have a quick look at the tails to make sure that particularly if you're cutting a lot that there's no little nasties left that are going to stop that the work coming together well I think we've now come to the really important bit so if this was a drawer what we do we glue this and we glue in here so you need to take a brush and paint the surface of all the M surfaces wherever this part touches that part whether it's in the sockets the sides of the sockets they all want coating with glue don't rely on putting a little blob of glue from a squeezy in each socket and hoping to God that it'll spread out when you put the things together cuz it won't anyway there we are it's glued and we put it together once and for all always drive um Dov toils together with a strip of wood don't rely on uh on on just tapping the piece with a with a softening block get a nice a nice solid piece of wood there you go a LP Dove tail now the principles that we used in cutting that are exactly the same literally for every doveet tail joint no matter what sort we cut one half of the joint and we Mark the other half from it with a sharp tool the monitored doveet tail the monitored secret dovetail that we saw at the beginning of the video is the only one where we cut the actual pins before we cut the Tails you'll find that it's impossible to Mark the pins from the Tails but it's possible to Mark the Tils from from the pins but apart from that we always cut the Tails first and mark the pins and away we go so that is it really we cut a lap Dove tail which of course would be the front of a a drawer and we just have a very fine shaving off of there and the drawer should fit so that's doveet Tails well so is this look at that and you think oh yeah it's another Haring Dove tail but it's not it's dovetail the other way and on the other surface of the wood we've got ordinary harving joint now just think about this I want you to citate on this one I'm going to puzzle you how the hell that those two pieces of wood go together and when you can cut one of allows you can cut D [Music] tails yeah

Channel: Dovetail Tim

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Id: H4Gq91Dcm7o

Length: 54min 27sec (3267 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 09 2024