I've been experimenting with making hand-cut dovetail joints.
The important thing with hand-cut dovetail joints,
is to use a geometry, especially for the pins,
that is way too narrow than something
that could be cut with a router bit. See these ones
there's now way a router bit would fit in there.
And that way you know that was made by hand.
Except I don't like all this tedious hand dovetailing work.
So, I've been using my Pantorouter and my bandsaw.
So, here's the pins part of half-blind dovetail joint.
And, that can mostly be cut with a router
by going in here, like so.
Here's a Pantorouter template I made.
And I made that by just cutting a whole bunch
of wedges, like this, and gluing them down on here.
And, I used this spacer block to make sure
I got them all at a consistent interval,
although if I was going for more genuine,
I'd probably want to space these slightly irregular.
One thing that's really nice about Kuldeep's
metal Pantorouter is that there's a nice
parallel adjustment for the template.
But, I made these 2 opposing wedges,
and that way I can raise this template by
small amount and still keep it parallel.
Working out the layout for this piece of walnut
that I'm gonna use for the pins,
I've got room for 3 tails to fit into it.
And I'm gonna have 2 full pins and a half pin
on either side.
Now that means one of the tails is going to fit
into the middle of the piece of wood,
and so I've got my follower bearing
right in the middle of one of the tails.
And the router here, I've marked the center,
and the router bit is centered right on that so,
I should be good to go.
I cut all these using a half inch router bit
because it cuts a lot quicker.
And, next I'll finish it with a smaller router bit,
that gets deeper into the corners.
And to follow that new shape, I'm just swapping out my
1 inch follower with a half inch follower.
So, the corners in here are still a little bit round.
And, I'll finish that off with a chisel.
So, these hand-cut dovetails
are not entirely fake,
because I still have a little bit of hand-work on them.
Next I need to cut the tails, like these.
And, to do that, I need to transfer
the marks from this one just with a pencil, like that.
But, I've usually ended up slipping and mispositioning
it a little bit, so I'm gonna jig this up
with these things clamped, like so.
And to make sure that this edge is flush with that,
I made this piece of wood,
which is exactly the same thickness.
as what's left here.
Put that here,
and then clamp the other piece here.
I'm just using a pencil because the lines
are so much easier to see.
I've tried it with a marking knife and
then I end up cutting in the wrong place.
I just need to cut this in a way that the pencil line stays.
So this box fits together like this and
next I need to cut a groove all around it
for the bottom to fit into.
But the catch here is, if I cut a groove in here
all the way to the end,
then that'll show on here.
On here it's no problem because this is hidden.
So, ideally I want the groove to be
inside of the middle of one of my tails, like here,
and it gets hidden by this part here and on here.
It still gets hidden this way
because if this was being made all with hand tools,
you would, of course, cut the groove with a plough plane,
and it would be very difficult to do a stop groove.
I, of course, will use a router. So, I'll just make a
stop groove in here and
I'll still hide the bottom groove.
I was gonna just slide the bottom in now, but
I just realized these stop grooves actually
make that impossible.
So, I have to try to jam this apart,
to get that bottom in.
Well, it's still good.
Oww!
Well, I put some clamps on there to get those joints
to fully close, and lots of sawdust
to clean up the glue mess.
So far I've got 2 coats of varnish on here.
And normally between coats you sand it a little bit
to smooth it, but I find it's better to go over it
with a scraper because that way
any sort of bumpiness on the surface, gets scraped flat.
So, here's the box varnished now.
And the joints look pretty good.
There is some very small gaps.
I made no attempts to fill them.
But, this was my first time making half-blind dovetails,
so I think I could improve on that.
The box is relatively clunky for a box that size
compared to what I do with box joints like
this little drawer,
or this box for puzzle pieces.
Because, I know those are very tight
and very strong for their size,
whereas on here, I left lots of room for
the half-blind joints. So, even though I cheated
with my hand-cut dovetails, they were still a lot of work.
I can only imagine how tedious it would be to
carve these entirely by hand.
Definitely not my thing.