The Art of Woodworking - Episode 4: Dovetail

hi I'm Phil lo at the Furniture Institute of Massachusetts and this is the ahta woodworking [Music] in this episode what I like to show you is how we do go about cutting dovetails and dovetails are used in different places when we build furniture and I'm going to show you a couple of pieces here and point out some of the places where we actually use them okay this is a little small dressing table that has a drawer and you can see the dovetail to cut on the front here and also on the back and we have a little drill bottom that slides out from underneath on this lowboy over here we also have dovetails included in it as well not only in all three of these drawers but we also have them in the vertical petition here which runs vertically here and you can see the dovetails at the top and the bottom and one other place that you can't see the dovetail is actually this top rail it actually goes down into the top post and I got an example over here that I'd like just like to show you okay this is a sample of a dovetail that goes into the top of a post and the the dovetail actually will come out here this is actually one that's a little bit more complicated because we have a dovetail that goes into the rail as well but the idea is that we have to cut an opening for the the dovetail to fit down inside and it's a wedge shape so we can't pull apart if we start to pull it in one direction or the other now I just want to go over a little bit as far as the the terminology of a dovetail I we have two different dovetails here one is a through dovetail which is on this side here and one's a blind dovetail which is on on this side over here and then we also have a third one which is a slot doubt arrow a sliding dovetail that's on the front front edge of this but if you look at the the through dovetail you know this I have marked as the end of the board these are the tails and these are what they call depends on the blind dovetail you know this would be used for a drawer front because you wouldn't see the dovetails coming through the end of the board like you do on this side here so but they both have the same exact things they have depends on the tails and one of the things we have to know also is that the we're talking about a surface and in an end of the board so that when I go to mark some of the things out you're going to be able to see you know when I refer to the end of the board we want to make sure we're going off of the right right surface but on the bench here if you can take a little look at what we got going on here these are the tools that we need for dovetailing and the first thing that we're going to use is the the marking gauge do some of the layout then we're going to need to use a bevel Square which is an adjustable square we're going to need a square that we can do some measurements with we could get us a variety of chisels here we get a dovetail saw hand playing a clamp in a big old mallet so we also have a small square that we do some of our checking with as well this is a beautiful little piece of equipment that's made by starett out and asked all Massachusetts but the first thing that we need to do is to go ahead and prepare the pieces and the pieces are prepared simply the way that we did in episode 2 so I'm going to just go ahead and put a plain across the inside surface of this to make sure that this is perfectly flat and then we'll continue on from there so we've got to get a nice flat surface to begin with and sometimes it only takes one or two passes as we go across and the main thing now this would be the inside of my drawer we don't plan the other side until we actually fit it into an opening so what I want to do now is I want to check this for flatness here which looks pretty good and then we also want to make sure that this board is flat I I plan this edge straight already so I want to make sure that this is square in this direction looks pretty good and also square in this direction and that looks good so now we also have to have what might be the draw side this is a nice little piece of pine that I'm going to use to do that make that the draw side and again I need to you know plain one surface flat to begin with and this would be the inside of the drawer as well so just put a hand plane across this okay we're going to make sure that that's flat and take a little bit more out of the middle here and that's looking pretty good and now we want to make sure that we have a straight edge and at the end of this is square now it looks pretty good we also want to make sure that this is perfectly square in this direction because if we use our marking gauge to do some of the layout if this ad if the edge of this or the end of this happens to be on an angle like so what happens is the marking gauge would be sitting on that angle and I would be making a line that's parallel to an angled piece and it wouldn't you know fit into the opposing Parker ectly so the first thing that we need to do is to go ahead and lay out some the blind portion I'm going to do the blind dovetails to start with so I'm going to pick up my marking gauge now this marking gauge I think we talked about a little bit the other day in episode 2 this has a knife in it with a flat surface and the head of the square is going to work go off of the inside of the drawer and that's how I mark the inside of the drawer now I need to make a line that's approximately leaving about 3 3/16 of an inch on the outside here so that I can have a good amount and I'm going to scribe a line across the end of this nice and deep because we want to be able to put a chisel in there now with this exact same setting and this is an important thing that you have to remember is that this setting is going to mark out the detail board we this piece here and I'm going to score this across the end again with a good deep cut so they can get a chisel in there and on the opposite side as well and we also do the edges now if you stop and think about this since this setting is the same on both the distance from this line to the inside and the distance from the end of the board to this line are exactly the same and that's one of the things that we have to make sure that that we do because otherwise what happens is it's not going to fit correctly and if we have to readjust the marking gauge it sort of introduces error into the work okay so the next thing that we have to do is we have to pick up the thickness of the what would might be the drew aside so we're going to go ahead and cap this now we want to make that exactly the same size that looks pretty good and we're going to scribe this on what is the inside face which is right along here I think I'll use this end match up I guess I'm going to use this on them which is the inside face now what's going on there is that this is the same thickness as a draw side okay now we have to come up with an angle for the dove for the pins you know we talked about pins and tail fins and Tails all the time sometimes people cut tails for some people cut pins first I'm a guy that likes to cut the pins for us but in reality if you're a really good craftsman you should be able to do it either way so so I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to face this towards you so that you can see what I'm doing and we need to pick up an angle for the dovetail and a lot of time there's a lot of jibber-jabber what the angle should be and you know they talk about a six to one ratio or an eight to one ratio or something like that and what they mean by that is that if we come over an inch along a baseline like so and let's just say we go up eight inches to a point here like so and we connect those this would be the angle that we would set our bevel square to like so like so and that's the angle that we would use to make our pinned angle now we have to come in a certain distance from the end from the edge I usually go come in about a quarter of an inch and make my first angle this way and then do it on the opposite opposite edge and then I usually will find the center and we'll bring it a pin from there and we'll flip this over and do it the opposite way and then we'll do another one in between and a lot of times when you get good at this you can just eyeball this and you can tell you can usually get fairly close just by by looking I'm going to go ahead and lay this out here and we want to try to make these relatively consistent in size I mean if I wanted to I could measure them but measuring them is takes a little bit more time but okay that's my simple layout for the dovetails now I have to go ahead and drop lines down the backside of this this is the straight line that I need to cut vertically off of the end of this board and one more okay that's the layout that we need for our pens now I have to saw these and I have a 15 point dovetail saw and the difference between the dovetails are on a back saw is that when you pick up the dovetail saw the the back of the saw actually points at an angle because most of the time when we're cutting dovetails were cutting at an angle so they actually put the handle on so it helps angle the sauce so that it cuts there a little bit easier I'm going to turn this around and I'm going to get you to look over my shoulder while I make these cuts now when we saw we one of the things you have to be careful of is that you make sure that the back of the saw your wrist your elbow and your shoulder are all lined up because if you crowd yourself like this what happens as your elbow hits your belly and it makes this all want to you know go on it on a curve so we're looking to make sure that we're cutting in a good straight line like so so in this situation what we're going to do now we're just going to go right alongside the line it just makes a couple of cuts down like so and we're going to make our cut going over to the scribe line on the end of the board and then the scribe down to the scribe line that indicates the thickness of the draw side and just go along Cuffy then we'll cut them in the opposite direction now that's really all it takes now I'm going to go ahead and set up on the end of the bench here and I'm going to chop these out okay I'm going to put the board on the end of the bench here now one thing I have to do is I have to make sure that the board is supported underneath by the bench if I have it hanging over like this and I start doing some of my chopping what happens is when we get down to this thin part of the the dovetail I might be too forceful and actually you know chop right through the other side so we want to make sure that the back surface is supported by the bench top and we're going to clamp this down to the bench top with one of these yogurts and clamps which we'll put on right like so and make sure that they're parallel and now we're going to grab a chisel and just let I always grab in a situation like this it's a half inch chisel which is this one right here and the reason for that is that there's less this less resistance on a narrow chisel there is a wide chisel so if I tried to drive this wide chisel into the surface of the the the material that I'm working with this wide chisel is not going to go in as deeply as the the 1/2 inch chisel that I'm going to use here ok so I'm going to go ahead and put my chisel on the surface here and what I'm looking for is that I want the distance from the back of the chisel to the line to be about a sixteenth of an inch away and one of the ways that I'm able to handle that is I call walking the chisel and what I mean by that is if I tilt the chisel to one side or the other and rotate it in my fingers like this I can actually get it to where I want it to be without sitting here trying to line it up each time so I'm going to go ahead and get this in position about a sixteenth from the line in between my two saw cuts and I'm going to make my first chop down this way and I'm going to go all the way across doing all four of the the tails and if you can get relatively close to the line without touching it that's what we're after now I'm going to come back in and cut it from the opposite direction and really what's happening here is I have where we're going to be splitting this material so what I've done with my chisel now is I've cut across these fibers of these vessels with my chisel now I'm going to be coming in this way and what happens is these are going to just split very easily when I actually tap this in from the end so I'm just going to go ahead and tap this like so and you can see that these just fall out of here ever so easily I'll get rid of those now with my second round of cuts what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to angle my chisel to the same angle that I made the saw cut so I'm cutting right down along this saw cut line I can just butt it up against what I've already cut and then I'm going to give this a really good whack so I'm driving this chisel in to almost a full depth of the bevel so I'm really making some good progress by giving this a good whack and we're going to come back again and chip these out or split them away now what we're after is we're going to try to come to within a sixteenth of an inch of the you know this line which will be the blind portion of the dovetail okay we'll go ahead and make another whack down this way and now I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to cut down along the angle of the dovetail and I have to be a little bit more gentle when I do this because if I hit this too hard I'm just going to split off the end but what what's why I'm doing this is if you might be able to see a little triangle right inside here and that's where the saw didn't actually cut so I'm going to go ahead and tap that in like so just so it relieves that cut on the inside corner and come back the other way all right make sure that this is tight bring this a little closer to the end of the bench here now this is where I want to be about a sixteenth of an inch away from my scribe line okay very good now this is all roughed out and I need to start you know cleaning up these places to the line so if we take a close look at this you can see that I still have a scribe line across here I haven't really gotten down to the scribe line here and so I'm going to go ahead and clamp this down in this direction so you can see what I'm doing I'll put a clamp on here I'm going to do I'm going to show you two ways that we clean this up there's one way one way is I'm going to be using a chisel and chop to my line and then the second way I'm going to actually put it in my vise and pair to my line and this you get you know similar results but you know when you pair to the line you actually get a you actually come out with something that's a little closer to being what you want because when we chop to the line like so I'm going to use a little wider chisel here sometimes what happens is the grain has a tendency to crush but you'll notice when I go to chop this I'm standing here looking at my chisel in this direction so they can see whether the back is perpendicular to my work or not so just come down like so and try to get into the corners and we want to get that now the beautiful thing about this scribe line that I made when I made the scribe line the on the surface of the board this is actually a square cut and an angle cut that happens and when I make that angle cut what I'm going to do is I'm putting the bevel towards the angle and the flat of the chisel towards the flat side so when we scribe that line with the marking gauge you know this line that's to that side is perfect perfectly perpendicular and the line to the wayside is actually angled okay now I'm going to change positions and I'm going to show you how I pair the these other two so let's go over to the vise alright so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to pair these these two surfaces using a paring chisel and a paring chisel as a chisel that we use strictly for handwork we don't do any chopping with so what I'm going to do to start with is I'm going to put my chisel right where you can see right here where that scribe line was and some of it actually broke away so I can rest my chisel on there without any difficulty and what I do to start with is I make a couple angle cuts this way and then I take out the middle and then set it right on the line and make it cut all the way in and what I'm looking for is that I'm trying to make a good angle cut or a cut that's perfectly parallel to the end and then when I make the consecutive cuts what I do is I only take about a sixteenth of an inch just using the corner of the chisel that way I have complete control over my cuts and we'll do that in the other side as well now we'll do this on the next one so we've got an angle cut an angle cut take out the middle with a couple of cuts and then sixteenth of an inch cut to either side now if your chisels aren't perfectly sharp here you're going to have a difficult time now one of the things that I like to do at this point is to go ahead and make a check and what I'm looking to do is I'm going to take my a little square and I'm going to set it on the end of the board and I'm going to drop it down until it just touches where the scribe line is then I'm going to tighten this up and then I'm going to go and I'm going to put it inside here and if it lifts if it lifts the square up like so and rocks that means that this surface is actually going uphill and I'll check it here this one looks pretty good this one's good going uphill just slightly you can see that that's rocking now see that and we'll check this one as well that one is the same so you just need to go back and I'm going to angle my chisel up a little bit more so I just take material from the back and we'll make another check do it again so it's very important that these these surfaces are parallel to the end of the board because if they are going uphill and we drive the other piece in we'll end up with a gap on the inside okay no one's just still a tad high and it seems to be pretty good okay now that we have that taken care of what I like to do now is I like to work on these the sides of the pins and you might be able to see a little triangle and see this little triangle inside here and that's from where the saw didn't actually cut so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to take my chisel put it up on edge like so and make you know these cuts to try to get rid of that little triangle that's on the side of the pins and one of the things I want you to notice is that I'm cutting in from this surface in this direction I'm not cutting down from above because if I cut down from above what happens is if the grain goes in one direction or the other the the chisel will start the make the cut and then it'll the grain will follow you know the grain line and it might undercut it or not cut it quite as much so you want to cut it across the grain like so as opposed to coming down from the top alright this is looking pretty good now the last check that I do is I'll take this ruler out of my square and I'll actually use the head of my square like so and I'll hold this up against the surface like this and if I can bring this up against the ruler and it looks a little bit if it's square or if it's angled in this direction its undercut slightly if it's angling in the opposite direction it neat means that I need to take material right down from this bottom corner right here so all of these are looking pretty good and I can tell by sighting these now that one might need a little bit work on the bottom and that one definitely does so go ahead just take a little bit from the very bottom here now if we happen to cut beyond the lines or whatever it doesn't really matter that much because you know we we're going to mark out these pins onto the tail board and whatever these pins are paired to now is what we're going to end up with now we've got to go ahead and make sure that the corners are cleaned out well and then we're going to retreat back to the bench to get this last little bit along describe line so here we go all right little let's get this relatively close to the edge of the bench we'll clamp this down now we'll take a wider chisel that will cut most of this and we just need to basically take the chisel and drag it up until it drops right into my scribe line and then we're going to go straight in like so well let's do since this is still attached here we need to make this cut first so we're going to go back and you know shop this away just go a little bit lighter chopping so we're going about another sixteenth of an inch deep right up against what we paired nicely so we have a good flat surface to put the chisel against and we'll cut down along the sides of the pins now by doing this what this does this is make sure that this cuts on these three sides so that when I make my cut coming in from the end of the board this the shavings should just fall away now that's a little bit better again we'll just drag the chisel until it's in the scribe line drag cut now the final check that we need to do is this very similar to what we did when we were up in the vise we're going to reassemble our square and we're going to put the square right on the scribe line and make sure that the head of the square sitting flat against the surface and we're going to take that and just drag it in and make sure that the backs of this isn't going uphill this way we're looking pretty good now I like to make a one final check looking at it in this direction and there's a few little places here that I need to get in there and clean up with a with the chisel so I'm going to go back to the vise and just go ahead and clean those up you know quickly and I want to make sure that these corners are cleaned out especially well we want to have a good good sharp corner if we don't have a sharp corner and it's sort of rounded off on there it tends to push the part away okay so I'm pretty pleased with this so the next thing that we need to do is we need to get we need to transfer these angles to the tailboard so let me just clean up a little bit here get things out of the way okay so what we need to do now is we need to try and get this these these pins transferred to the to the board so what I'm going to do is I'm going to put this up against the the end of the board the piece of pine I'm going to drag forward until this scribe line catches right on the corner and then I'm going to rock this forward and then I'm going to reach in here with a good sharp pencil and lay out the angles of the Pens on to the tailboard beautiful and if they didn't get quite into the corner you have to finish those off now what I need to do is I need to transfer square lines across the end of the tail board so I'll put this up right in the vise like this so you can see what I'm doing and I'm going to go ahead and transfer these across like so you want to be a little bit nice and accurate when you do this because if you're not it can throw your cuts off a bit okay so one thing you have to remember is that when I put the the drawer front up against the end of the board here and I drew my line that you have to realize that that line is alongside of the actual opening so if I going to make my cuts I have to make sure that I leave my pencil line and if you start to take the pencil line away what happens is that the space that you're creating is too large and we start to get gaps around the details so now what we're going to do is we're going to put this back up in the vise this way and we'll go ahead and tilt this ever so slightly so that we're making cuts that are perfectly perpendicular now let's go ahead and grab the dovetail saw and what like I was saying before is when I make my cut here now this this is really craftsmanship the idea is that if we can cut right to the side of the line and the saw cuts are nice and smooth without too much wandering we'll be able to put this thing together without doing a whole lot of paring so this is where the skill actually comes in is when we saw in these so look what we need to do is go cut right down along the side of those pencil lines and you notice I go on an angle so I cut to the very to the very corner of the board and then to the scribe line and then I just follow down the back side of it what I've already cut nice easy cuts gentle now when you're soaring you want to almost not have any pressure on the saw handle at all and just let the weight of the saw do your cutting for you nice gentle cuts and you want to use the entire saw start off at on this hip and make long cuts going right down to the side okay then we're going to go ahead and tilt this in the opposite direction and we're going to cut alongside here now what I usually do I'll stick a thumbnail right in the pencil line and that helps me to get it started okay now I'm just going to reach up and grab myself a crosscut saw and we're going to use the crosscut saw to cut off these two and pins okay now we're going to go back over to the bench and we're going to get chop these out and hopefully just put them together okay I'm going to grab myself a sacrificial piece of wood that I can put underneath here because I don't want to chop into my bench top and one of the things that I always like to do was that since this was laid out on the inside of the drawer I usually put the inside surface down the ones that have the pencil box down like this because this is the outside and I can chop fairly close to the line without any problem and one of the things that could happen is if I chop and I miss the you know miss cut and it chips out on one of the sides it's to the inside of the drawer and it's not going to really see it so you know most people will pull out the drawer to go look at that those are really nice looking dovetails so so we'll put that facedown like this we'll clamp it to the bench and tighten that up and we'll grab a chisel that will fit in between these lines here and we're going to stay a sixteenth of an inch away and ever so carefully we're just going to chop right down to to the other side now you notice that those popped out there so I'm just going to just go ahead and tap those back into their opening and push them out of the way now what you're going to notice that we still have our scribe line here so we need to either go into the vise in school to subscribe a pear to our line or we can just go ahead and try and cut it down this way so sometimes I'll go half way through on one side like this and then flip it over and come in from the opposite side or you can put it up right in the vise like so and pair it across this way and then spin it around and you come in from the opposite direction now with this up right in the vise I usually will take care of the end pins as well since we haven't haven't cut to our scribe line here so so we'll go ahead and take a paring chisel slide it up into the line and make a slicing cut going across and make a nice smooth cut and then we'll come in from the opposite direction and now I need to check to make sure that all the material is out of here and that my corners are good and square okay looks like we're pretty close to what we need and then we'll grab our pin board hold this up right I'm going to grab a hammer to tap it together with and have to find the inside inside is going that way just get that started for the sacrificial piece of wood on the top and just write that down and there you have so once we have that driven into into place this would be the drawer that would fit into the opening and then we need to clean off the side so we'll take a hand plane and clean this up nicely and there you have it looks pretty nice no gaps on the inside the pins the tails nicely fit no gaps along the end so that's the art of dovetailing let me show you just a couple other dovetail scenarios and we'll be on our way okay these are just a couple of the dope tails that I'd like to show you these are actually some double dovetails so if you look at the this would be a you know a drawer that would have an angled side or a bombay chest which you have a curve on the inside of the case and these are all cut you know with a it's called the compound angle dovetail because the drawer front is tilted in one direction the drawer side is tilted in another direction and when these come apart they're really quite strange-looking dovetail and as you can see instead of these going straight in there on quite an angle and on an angle here as well and the way that these are sort of cut they're on an angle going across the ends of this as well a little bit more complicated than the one that we just did and then we have one last one that I like to show you which is sort of the ultimate thing in dovetailing it actually looks like a miter joint but if you take it apart it's actually dovetailed on the inside and it's what we call a blind mitered dovetail so this miter actually is what you know joins together and disguises the entire joint on the inside so there you go folks this is the real art of dovetailing I'm Phil lo at the furniture Institute and this is the art of woodworking thanks so much [Music]

Channel: Beverly Community Access Media

Views: 109,674

Rating: 4.9208174 out of 5

Keywords: BevCam

Id: 74dVRDlAuwg

Length: 44min 2sec (2642 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 13 2017