(rock music) Marc: Welcome to part two
of our end table series. Last time we were pretty much at the point where we needed to make
a decision on how the stretchers were going
to join up to our legs. Some of the options that we had were, of course a mortise and tenon joint. Wouldn't be too difficult, a lot of ways you could make a mortise
in a piece like this, with either a router, or
using a mortising chisel and bit set on a hollow chisel mortiser.
The tenon of course, I
would probably just use a miter gauge and a dado
blade on the table saw. I would say the only tricky thing about that is the fact that
since these are coming up at probably about a 10 degree angle, you're going to have to make
an angled tenon on this piece. That's the only tricky business there, but even still that's not
too bad on a table saw. Far and away the most
popular option that everyone seems to want to see is
the sliding dovetail. For anyone who's not familiar,
we pretty much know what dovetail joints are, they're
most commonly used in drawers, but there's a sliding version
where it's a very long joint, like this, and another piece
which would be the male of the dovetail slides into
the female slot, like so. Very strong joint, extremely resistant to pulling apart in this direction, and if you notice on
this samplee that I made, that goes all the way through.
That's exactly what we don't
want to do in the final piece, this was just a sample so
I wasn't worried about it. If it goes all the way through, the glue is going to hold
it in place but technically this could slide all the
way through and come right out the bottom, there's
nothing supporting it. When we make our final cuts we absolutely want to leave a little
bit of material here and make what would be a stopped groove. We want to make sure that
there's wood there so that we resist that
downward motion as well. Between that, the dovetail
itself and some glue, that's going to be a very strong joint
for this little end table. It's going to be cool,
it's going to be awesome, and it's going to be a heck of a lot of fun getting that joint to fit perfectly.
(bouncy synth music) Here's one of my leg blanks,
and here's our template. If you put it onto the
leg blank you could see in this region here is
where we're going to need to create a stopped sliding dovetail, and the question is how
are we doing to do it. I know I want to use
my handheld router with an edge guide to actually
create that groove, but we've got solid material here. Even if we mark it out with a
pencil that this is the area that that dovetail groove is
going to go, how do you get the bit through the material
and then start going in? I've got a couple tricks up my sleeve on how we're going to deal with that.
Should be interesting
so let's check it out. Put our template on, line
it up with my fingers. And trace around with a pencil. The important thing here
is this area right there, right where the other
piece is going to join. We want to transfer those
pencil marks to the edge. Extend those lines all
the way across the edge. Now remember, the leg is
sitting like this, we want to have it stop at a certain
point, our dovetail groove. I'm going to put a line at about three quarters of an inch up from here. I think that's enough material to give us the support that we're looking for here. Draw another line, and then I want to indicate that this is not to be touched. I might even use some chalk here so that there's no question,
literally fill that in. I only want my dovetail slot to
go that far, and then it stops. Now here's our challenge. We basically need to drive
our bit in above this line somewhere, because this is
all waste material up here, if you look at the final shape
we'll be cutting this away.
But I still want to get access
while this is here so that my router base can rest on this
full surface and be really safe. You can't just plunge that
dovetail bit down and go. I mean you can, but it gets a little bit messy and it's a little bit scary. I'm going to make my life
a little bit easier by drilling a hole here ahead
of time with a forstner bit. I'm going to go down
about a half of an inch, since my dovetail groove is
only going to be about 7/16ths.
It will be a little bit higher than that. I'll be able to set my router down, plunge down into that
open hole, and then start pulling through the material
and stop at this point. That's the procedure
that I'm going to use. Check this out. We've
got our router set up, I've got my dovetail bit in here, it's protruding about 7/16th of an inch, and I've got my edge guide in place.
It's not set yet, that's what
we're going to focus on right now. If you look closely, I don't
know if you could even see it on there, we've got the
black on black situation here. What I've done is I've set my adjustable square here and I did
it in a practice area just to make sure I got the right number. What I want is a channel in the middle that is about a half of an inch wide. I do a line from each side
and I have a perfectly centered half-inch line zone in here. That is going to be where
my bit is going to travel, I want to clear all that material out. In order to do that we
have to go in two passes. We'll put the edge guide
on this side first, travel from our hole
all the way to our line. Then we'll come back,
switch the router around, put the edge guide on this side, and do the same pass that will
establish the far line here.
You have to do it in two passes, I don't even know that
there's, I'm sure there are dovetail bits that can
handle that in one shot. That would have been nice,
but the advantage here is I will guarantee that
I have a dead-centered slot by doing it once on each end and removing a little bit of
material on both sides. If you have a really,
really deep and really wide dovetail slot that you're creating, it may not be a bad idea
to chuck up a straight bit that fits well within these borders, and run that straight
bit through there first. That will clear out the
bulk of the material, then you come back with
the dovetail bit afterwards and shape it to the proper
shape that you want.
That puts a lot less
stress on your router bit, and your router, and on
you, because it doesn't want to pull you in any
particular direction. (grinding) Notice here, I did stay a
little bit short of my line, we've got a little bit
of extra material here, but I'm going to relieve that material with a chisel and clean it up that way, so that I can be sure that
each one is in the same spot. With the dust collection and the router bit going and everything, it's very hard to stop at
exactly the right location.
A chisel and traditional hand tools are the best way to clean that up. The female dovetail slot is
cut into all four of our legs. They all look pretty good, came out nice. We can probably, at this
point, turn our attention to milling the male
portion on the stretcher, but just for a second
I think we should turn our attention to the center of this table, we haven't really talked about that yet. My concern here is where
these joints all come together in the middle,
there's going to be four pieces that we have to be
concerned with, and how do you get four pieces all coming
in at a 10 degree angle to meet in the middle and be secure
and be a nice tight joint.
There's a lot of ways that you
can do it, with a big half-lap, you could use some sort of
complicated crossover of dowels. I've been tossing these ideas around, I still don't 100 percent
know what I'm going to do. I think that's going to be
our challenge for next time, and any suggestions you
guys have would be welcome, but one thing I am considering
is the dovetail slot. The reason we have to
think about it at this stage is we could save
ourselves a lot of trouble if that's the route
that we're going to go. I'm actually going to mill
this stuff now, and even if I don't use it at least I know
it's there and ready to go. While I was milling my stock,
I've told you guys in the past, always make sure you mill extra material just so that you have it on hand. You just never know, for
practice cuts, things like that. You're going to find a lot of times where that's going to save you a lot of trouble.
When I milled this up I milled
up a few other pieces of scrap, so I took one of these
pieces and milled it, turned it the other way and
milled it to the same thickness. Now this is a perfect square representing the thickness of our stock material here. Technically, if I wanted
to, if this were one of the stretchers coming
in at a 10 degree angle, and let's say instead
of a round center piece, I wanted to make mine square. Well, it's already the perfect thickness, so that if I were able to mill the dovetail slots in here on all four sides, I could potentially have a
way of connecting everything in the middle, and
using the same material.
That's why we need to think about it now, because if this is the same thickness, then I technically should
be able to go over, put this in the bench, do the same exact routing procedure on all four sides, one pass on each side, and make the same exact size slot that we have on our legs. If I could do that now and just have this material ready to go, it may just be a no-brainer
when it's all said and done.
I've got to cut the male side
on one of the stretchers here, all I have to do is cut the
same male on the other side, and technically, it should fit perfectly. I've got something really
cool here to show you. I just started routing the
slots for the center post, the female dovetail slot, and I got
through my second one and it didn't take more than a couple
inches before I was like, "Uh, this is going to be a problem." They're too deep, so for
a piece of this dimension, watch what happens, those
pieces, wah-wah-wah-wah.
They get awfully close to each other, leaving very little material here. All the strength that we're
trying to gain from using a dovetail is completely out
the window if we do this. What I was hoping to do was
to avoid having different sized dovetails in the
center than the outside, but it's unavoidable at this point. Again, this is all part
of designing on the fly. That's something that I probably
wouldn't have even thought of, really, until I got to
that point, but the reason, I actually had just said that
that this will save your butt. When you make extra material
and you've got it on hand, it will definitely save you
some trouble in the future. Perfect example of how that works. I basically brought it up
about an eighth of an inch, moved it in just a little
bit so it's not as wide, and this is what I wound up with. That's reasonable, and I don't see any reason why that isn't
going to work for us.
Now it's time to start
cutting some test pieces to see if we could get this fit right. The problem is even if I do
have a test piece, let's say something like this, there's
no way to get that in there. What I'm going to do is
make a rough cut on the bandsaw and remove this
top corner of material, just as if we were cutting
it out for the final product. I'm just going to leave
a little bit of extra material, maybe about a
16th, and remove that. This is one of those times
when the bandsaw blade is just too wide for the
curve that we want to cut. I simply do two straight cuts that will essentially break the
curve into smaller chunks, and my blade can handle
that with no problem.
I finish the cut from the other direction. Now I use a piece of
scrap to set up the tools. I mark two lines on the
end of the test piece that correspond to the bottom
of the dovetail groove. I then extend those lines all
the way across the end grain. Next I want to remove the excess material in order to reduce
strain on the router bit. I set the blade height so
that it's well under the line. Using my miter gauge at the proper angle, I make a few passes to remove
the majority of the waste wood. Remember that the apron
pieces are cut at a 10 degree angle so we need to adjust
the gauge accordingly. Next I head to the router table where my dovetail bit is already installed. I make a few passes and make
a little adjustment here and there to the bit height
and the fence as I go.
Once the sample fits the
machines are all set up. I go through the same process with my actual work pieces, with one addition. I start by scribing a line around the perimeter using a marking gauge. This is going to reduce
any chances of tearout. Now we're making some serious progress. My stretchers both have
the dovetails on them, and of course like we had
discussed, the one that goes into the legs is a
little bit wider and more substantial than the one that
goes into the center piece. You can see the center piece has now been trimmed down to the appropriate size. At this point the only
major thing left to do with these parts is to trim
off part of the dovetail, because remember, this has
to come all the way down and then sit right on top of
this stopped groove here.
In order to do that we need to
remove some of this material. Hand tools is the best way
that I know to get that done. (sawing) I take it down as far as I
can without actually touching the base in this area here,
because we don't want to show any marks on the outside,
that will really screw it up. Get down nice and close. Just like Price is Right,
closest without going over. Then I get the flush trim
saw and I utilize this reference surface here to
saw away that material.
I'm putting a lot of pressure
down with my fingers here. Take your time here, no rush,
you just want to make sure this edge is nice and crisp,
and even straight across. Once I have a clean cut
across I can be a little bit more free with my motion here now, because that was the critical part. As I'm cutting across
here in this position, I'm actually going to
put my finger here and bend the flexible saw up a little bit. I don't want to harm the
integrity of that edge, so by pushing up a little
bit I can guarantee that I'm scooping out that
little bit of material. Take it all the way down. Let's see what we're left with here. Not bad, huh. It's pretty flush. Any left over material there, easy enough, just grab a chisel and pare it away. Now with all of the dovetails trimmed down, everything is pretty close. The thing is, there's a
natural variance because we used a router to do
this, and there's a lot of variables that can cause
something to fit perfectly in one of these slots but a
little tight in the other.
It's best to go around to each and every one and find where the best fit is. Then once you have that, label them. You want them to correspond
to a specific socket. That way you can fine tune them
to fit perfectly, individually. For instance, this one
I labelled number one, it slid in really nice to
this particular groove here, but it didn't go down far enough. At that point I grabbed my
chisel and I did a little bit of work to round over this
part here, because straight from the saw over there
it's not round, it's square. To really get it to seat nice and perfect, and get everyone to sit
in the proper position, go back to the chisel
and round over the end of this piece here, and have
them all fit individually. Same thing goes for the
bigger dovetail on the legs. I'm going to match them
up to each individual leg, number them, and then fine
tune them individually.
Fine tuning consists of a
little bit of chisel work. Be extra careful here not to
change the angle of the dovetail. A quick test fit and we're
ready for the glue up. That is, if I can get this piece back out. (bright blues music).