No Measure Dovetails

there are two main styles of dovetails now there are a lot of different types of dovetails I mean you have your you have a true dovetail you have a half-blind dovetail you can even do a full blind dovetail a mitered dovetail a full blind mitered dovetail they even have starburst dovetails you can do sliding dovetail same if you are a fan of Roy Underhill they even have the impossible dovetail there are lots of different types of dovetails but really there's only make two main styles of dovetail herbs there's gonna be that person that's gonna cut a dovetail they're gonna sit back in examine it and they're gonna tell themselves that the entire value the the perceived value the general public is going to have on my craftsmanship ability thus the exponential value I have to the human race is based upon the parallelism and the lack of vacancy inside my joinery the general public is really going to exalt me to a high level plane based upon what they see now don't worry I do have a video for that type of person coming up fairly shortly but there's a lot of us out there that kind of recognize that dovetails are a utilitarian joint something to slap to parts to get that rarely quickly most of the time they're not even going to be seen it's maybe in a painted cabinet or a blanket chest or maybe it's gonna be behind molding on a cabinet or drawers really common use there in the back whoever looks at the back of a drawer I bet the drawers in your kitchen right now have staples in them and you never even realize it may be on the sides of the drawer people might recognize oh it's a dovetail that's about it but if you were to pull out a magnifying glass to look at them well this style of dovetail is going to tell you I'm sorry idfc if it doesn't meet your cosmetic superficial filtered idea of what joinery should look like this is something I built fast officially and it is going to serve generations to come that's the type of person this video is for those people that want to learn how to do it fast efficient no measuring stolid of telly now for this project I'm just gonna use some pine this is just an example of quick way to do dovetails and I'm kind of success straight out with a short drawer I'm going to kind of do it like I do a drawers typical a drawer I'm gonna have a fairly thick front portion and a fairly big thick back portion and we're going to be doing a through dovetails so I'm gonna be working on the back corner of it and I do this quite often because I just think the proportions look better it's roughly 1/3 of the thickness of this and I like having a thicker board on back because a lot of times on the back of the board I'll have the bottom of the drawer slide underneath it and protrude and I'll put a screw underneath it that's kind of wall or down that will allow for a little bit of movement plus the fact that I can adjust the doors depth by shaving this off a little bit so if it's protruding a little bit this will hit the back of it so I can adjust you know fractions of a millimeter how far in a drawer goes by how much I swing slice off of them that think of it as a depth stop now the tools I use while I'm cutting a fast and efficient dovetail is obviously a dovetail of coping saw in a marking knife and ubiquitous 1/2 inch chisel I also have a little Moxon vise to hold it and this is just construction lumber and some maple dowels I put threads on and I tap the southern yellow pine here so it'll go in and out fairly simple set up now if you were to think it through you would understand that you're going to be putting the tails the angle portions on the sides because if you have a thick front and a thick back the sides are pulling up pulling down on them the thin ones and I typically would do a through tug Dale on the back of the drawer and a half-blind dovetail on the front cuz I personally don't want to see the dovetails on the face of a drawer and if you want to get good at this pick a project that has seven or eight drawers in it maybe a small cabinet or a jewelry box or something like that and do all the backs first because you'll get a lot of practice on the backs with your song skills and then when you do the Front's that are half blind half lines are actually a lot more forgiving so you do a lot better job there so we have to decide what side of this board to do my full blind dovetails and yes that is a thought process you want to do because when after you finish your dovetails you're generally going to plain either the pale tails or pins smooth and if the front of the drawer is more important than the back you don't want tear out going this direction so you want your planning to go uphill on this side of the board so if you get tear out it's on the backside where nobody's gonna see it yeah pick it through from the very GetGo now on this board the grain is starting from the bottom and going towards the top so by planning this way it's gonna be the smoothest so I want to put mine through dovetails on the backside here so the first thing we're going to want to do is mark our depth this board is obviously thinner than that board so I want to mark this exact thickness and normally that would require two marking gauges but I'm going to be lazy and fast and I'm just gonna use my chisel and notice I laid it down flat on this with a bevel pointing up because if I put it on this edge right here with the bevel ramping up if I were to drag across this way my force is going to want to push that chisel down and now keep it flat against this board and I can actually just glide it along you use the chisel itself as a marking gauge making a nice straight line do that one on both sides because this is a through dovetail but you don't have to do it on the top right there that I'll just leave more lines that you have to peel off because we're going to be cutting the edges off of this one and then repeat the process this board lay it down on side place your chisel down and mark your edge next up is putting in my bias or securing it however you want to do it now I have that little X right there and that shows me that when I'm planning off this and I'm going against the grain I want this to be the back this is gonna be the front so planing it when I brought plane they all smooth that'll be the nice smooth slide so if there is any tear-out you'll be towards the back of it and I want to put that towards me in my vise I'm also not going to have it up a little bit hard because this is a very thin board up here there's a vibration induction I mean it'll vibrate more I want it way down low because lowered it is the more accurately my saw will work because it's not fighting that vibration now force I have it is I will come back and I will position it so it is parallel with the ground and you can just eyeball this us humans are actually pretty good at determining straight up and down visually because otherwise we'd be falling over all over the place just just set back try and get it vibrate and they tighten it up now my first cut will always be from the edge I'm gonna come over a little bit how much is determined how I'm attaching the drawer the drawer is gonna be on a little ledge right here I'm not gonna worry about because I'm gonna put on glue that ledge on but if I've cut a groove along the bottom for it to slide into then I want to make sure that I cut off the groove whenever I'm doing my dovetail so no matter what I do I want to space it so that groove is gone I'm not doing anything like that I just don't worry about it and for the first cut I just come over however far I want now it is really easy to determine parallel I mean offset now there is a trick where you can look into the reflection of the saw and I'll show you that too the second before this first cut I just come over walk it over get a certain distance over make sure it's parallel and then I make a slice straight across no big deal now once you notice after about three strokes I've gone down if pretty consistent depth and every saw is gonna be a little bit different you're gonna get a feel for it maybe it's two strokes maybe it's four strokes for you but what I found to be consistent on all my angles is that the three strokes I can actually just let the soft fall to one side or the other kind of like that and now give me a consistent angle that I like and from there I just saw down to my baseline right up now do the same exact thing to the other side come over rough through the same distance make your piece throw one two three let it fall over a little bit let's slow down to that basis now one of the aspects that shows quality craftsmanship is tale spacing what looks good what doesn't look good and there's a lot of different tricks you can do with dividers and all that constant but once again we're using the no measure fast down and dirty rude crude method of making a dovetail so we're not gonna do any of that and the example I'm doing is you know roughly drawer thickness maybe a desk drawer you know that kind of thickness if you're doing bigger stuff you can use what I'm about to show you as an example of what you can do without having to measure anything now on that size drawer I would typically put two dovetails in the back and maybe three or four in the front maybe a little fancier in the front the reason why I do two in the Mac is because if I screw up one at least the other one will work and you only need one of them to work and what I do is I well first we've already done those two sides know equal distance from the edge that's a start if I'm only doing two oh actually take my saw kind of eyeball the center and I will make a knife line just align right in the center and from there I will come over an equal distance from that line to make those two cups the only thing I'm really concerned with is I want this distance right here to be more than a half inch because I'm too lazy to go find another size chisel I've got a half-inch right there and my workbench but if you wanted do more than that maybe three or any higher number be going more than two I would stick with an odd number what I would do is I would probably cut over an equal amount on both sides and cut those two sides side dovetail so that they look balanced and then whatever is left over will become my center one and that might be quite a bit bigger than the two outside ones but because there's some symmetry to there it will at least look nice and that's generally how I would do it I will get them equal on both sides and not a worry about the center one and that's why I would do odd numbers that way so for this one I'm only gonna do two because it's on the back so I kind of eyeball the center now just take a stroke that's gonna be cut away anyway so it doesn't really matter and then I'm going to come over a certain distance now how far is a distance well I don't want to have to walk across a shop to get a different size chisel so if you ever want to cheat you can come over here or do I do it on this side but just for the camera and just kind of rock it back and forth to give you a dent and that's how big you have to make the cut out for this chisel to work so what do I do I just kind of eyeball where that angle is gonna be I come over a little bit I take my three strokes I angle it and I saw down stop at the base line come over an equal amount right over there and take my three strokes angle it down to the base line and there we go I'm done next step up grab my coping saw I'm going to take it almost all the way down to that base line right there now a lot of people will arc it from one corner down to the other and then they will come back in and clean it up that way well that's two to two movements I just go down to that base line I'm gonna press sideways on my blade and then just get it moving and that's basically using the set on the teeth to turn a slight triangle can you see that and then I can just go straight across on that base line there pull it out put it in sideways and cut off those sides now I accidentally forgot to mark the line across the top for me to fall but I do have that indentation from this line coming up I could just drop my fingernail in there and that's one reason why whenever I know I'm going to be doing a lot of dovetailing I leave this index finger nail a little bit long versus my normal really short I can just drop it in there slide it up line it over on this side that line next is just a matter clean up make sure your shirt chisel is really really sharp if you're using soft woods and the closer you saw to your line the easier it will be let me see if I can run this as close as I can zoom in so I'm just going to take the chisel halfway to the line and halfway down I got really close there so now I'm just gonna drop it right in that line and go halfway down I don't want to go all the way through the board just half way drop it in the line halfway down and remember this is the back so the better you get here the better the show side on the front will look out come through half way down I'm going to go right in that line now if you want to take a bigger bite you can always angle the chisel a little bit and with a little bit of experience you would determine how far out you can go because what's happening is because there's air over here as you chisel down there's nothing here to press it this way but if you're to chisel in the middle of the board the pressure on the blade is equal on both sides so it will want to equalize that pressure and it will move the chisel back one way or the other so if you're taking a big bite and there's pressure on this side well by angling it a little bit you can kind of equalize the pressure but I don't have much wood on this side so I'll just go straight down and take it all off if you don't have a super sharp chisel what you end up with it's a tad bit of blow out on the interior no big deal because the glue surface is on the sides not the end grain now from there you right back over to your vise to readjust it for a thicker case yeah I'm gonna do the side over here now I'm going to have a well if I'm doing a front end I definitely have a sho side in the back side if you're doing the inside of it go ahead and plane it smooth because this might be the last time you touch that and don't worry about the outside right this one right here to the back of it so I don't really matter I'm gonna drop it down into my vise now once again I built this little thing right here and it's just the same exact size of this so I can rest whatever piece I have and make it flush with what whatever you're doing that's one reason why I really like this Moxon because I have about an inch and a half of wood that's nice and parallel here come back over I can drop it down grab my knife I definitely prefer a knife versus a pencil here and transfer the lines this is not measuring it's just transferring what already exists now the key thing is when you transfer your lines you want press pretty hard because you want it pretty dented in and the trick is you want those dents to stay now remember I had wood here I want this to stay so if I were to marking on the outside of this making that knife line then that knife line is part of the wood that's coming up so I really I just want to remove this so I'm not taking the line I'm not splitting the line I'm leaving the line and removing everything right up to it step back make sure is dead on vertical before you tighten up your workbench and that is incredibly important at this point in time not so much that the first one is a good practice to get into because now you're gonna be using gravity in your favor pick up the saw and let's get to work now this is the waist side so if I were to drop my finger now into the knife line basically I would be sawing on my good side side pointing time I'm actually going to be using the fat of my finger to control where this is so I kind of squeeze it right there and I roll my finger back to get it in there that way I can roll it forward to sneak up on that line and I'm going to start on this far side by lifting up my handle and just sawing right on that line but not take it bring it back once I get going I'm going to balance my saw you see one of the advantages of back saw is it carries its weight up high and it's kind of like balancing a broom on your hand with the weight up high it's easier to balance so if I can just get it to a nice balance point right there I know I'm going to be plumb at which point I will saw straight down to the lawn this side and then write it up now I don't really care if I go pass the line a little bit on this side because that's the interior I'm sawing on the exterior if I just meet the line they're visually it'll be okay then it's just a matter on this side here's a waste side so I could drop my finger now into that knife line creates a little backup come back over move my fat of my finger to line up just perfectly find that balance now really this is such a short distance if I was little bit off on that balance it really wouldn't matter that much now from there I'm just gonna chop it out this time to show you that you don't have to saw it out and I did just rehome the saw blade the chisel blade because it was really dull the last time so I'm gonna come halfway to that line and chop halfway down halfway the line chopped halfway down you hold the chisel down by like a pencil you can go a little bit quicker rather than holding up top where it's harder than halfway down now here's a little trick see how I cut halfway down it's flown away if I were to cut halfway exactly the same spot on the other side it will break off so what I do is on the other side I go a little action more than halfway and chop down the angle just a tad bit more than halfway and chop down and notice it doesn't crack off and break away there because the bottom was supporting it a little bit more from the top flip it back over halfway to the line halfway down and it gets easier the closer the lawn to the line again now as you do this you have to remember the wider side is going to be the SHO side most people are not going to see the interior so I like to do on the last chop the wide side first so I'll come in I'm just going to drop it right into that line I've done this and no long enough to know that that's just enough that I can get away with doing that go halfway down and that will leave me a very crisp line if there is any blowout the blowout will happen on the inside flip it chop out the rest and you're almost done now the last thing I like to do is I will grab my marking gauge and because I have fairly wide tails and pins I'm gonna use an interior corner now the tip the interior corner I can leverage against it to kind of Whittle way any kind of schmutz I see in there doesn't take but a few seconds generally it's one swipe and everything comes off and if I see anything like maybe I missed my line a little bit I can carve it off now I do know some people will come in to this anterior corner right here right there and shave it away but on soft pine I don't really feel that's a big deal so right now all that's left is to get up a metal hammer and let's test it out and why metal do you ask well you can actually hear if it's a little bit too tight with a metal with the rubber one it kind of dead it doesn't give you a much of a feel so listen it's a little tight on this side but this side sitting perfect can you hear that difference so just before I hammer it down I just want to check to make sure what's going on there's a little bit much right there just gonna take care of that there we go get a position that you give her this foot now yep I can hear different pretty nice tight joint holds its own weight so let's plant is smooth and see what the results are once again I like my little spacer right there cuz it just gives me a little support I can drop it right down there it makes maintains it nice and straight clamp it down smooth it out just plain tin long enough to get your ingrained you lined up there if you want you can plane it enough to remove the lines but I don't mind the lines myself and you're gonna be doing the other side so don't worry about making this perfectly smooth but here we go hand results gap isn't too bad on this side it could probably be a little bit better on that side but no big deal playing that down if you're using high glue little high glue sawdust I would cover it up but there you go now it holds its own weight so I consider that a fairly good joint and it'll work with a little big glue for generations now some of y'all might be out there saying that hey he just cuts these a lot he has long experience with really I mean this is the end of January the last four or five months out of the year I am pretty much at the lathe constantly trying to make stuff to sell during the holiday season the beginning of January I'm out harvesting trees so that at the end of next year I will have stuck wood dry enough that I can actually mix up for the holiday season I can honestly say I probably have not cut a hand joint in four or five months and this was the first one I did in that long of time it isn't a touch or feel because I've lost those a long time ago it's just understanding some basic concepts and steps to making cuts letting the machinery and physics do all the work for you and if your joint is tight I mean not very tight or you got a big guess no no maybe it's a wiggly and good so bad that it won't hold its own way anymore I mean as that bad well they're even tips and take you can use to fix it and that'll be in the upcoming video after I do the more of snobby to solve dovetails I'll break that one too and have a video on how to fix your dovetails hmm so bad well if you enjoyed this video please do me a favor like favorite subscribe do all those social medias tell your friends visit my website worth effort calm where I write a fairly frequent blog I'm starting a newsletter I also have an online store where I saw not only my own woodworking but some swags is a t-shirts hats and there are links to other ways you can patronize us and all those little dudes help subsidize buy material and offsetting time cause of making these videos for you and at the end I want you to remember one last thing that it is always worth the effort to learn create stuff and share with others you'll be safe and have fun

Channel: wortheffort

Views: 56,534

Keywords: wortheffort, saw, gent, chisel, chop, plane, hand saw, back saw, backsaw, dovetail, thru dovetail, blind dovetail, through, blind, half-blind, miter, diy, beginner, technique, lesson, craft, wood, woodworking, wood working, joint, joinery, hand cut, hand, handtool, traditional, modern, easy

Id: 8BBEGqRfKAI

Length: 26min 18sec (1578 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 31 2019