Today, I'm gonna show you four
different ways to cut dovetails. Today's video is sponsored by squarespace. First method is going to
be nothing but hand tools. So it went ahead and built up some
Walnut, which means I planed it. I cut it. I joined it and I resaw it
resawn resaw it resawed resawn. Anyway, I got half inch Walnut. That
is four inches wide. Here we go. The first of the three methods
will be the hard way by hand. So we're gonna mark our pin
boards and our tail boards. Now we're gonna set our marking
gauge to the thickness of our board, which is a half inch. And this little indentation is gonna
give us a place to set our chisel and our saw this is much more accurate
than using a pencil line. On this four inch board. I want
three tails. So it's one side. I'm going to mark where
I want my half pin to be.
So now I'm gonna take my dividers and
I want to figure out this space here, and I want three tails. So I want to
go three swings and land on that line. So it's gonna take a couple
times. So there's 1, 2, 3, 2 big. We'll bring it in 1, 2, 3. So now that I have my dividers set, I'm going to make an indentation with
the points. So I'm gonna make that first 1, 1, 2, And three, and I'm gonna do the same thing
from the other side three, I'm going to take a marking knife and
I'm going to stick it in the hole. Bring up my square to it, touches
the knife and scribe a line. And I'm gonna do that with all six holes. I don't cut dovetails very often and I
don't plan to cut dovetails very often. So I am going to use this
Katz Moses dovetail jig.
This is like training wheels.
This is gonna help me get
the saw at the correct angle. Don't let anybody tell you that you
can't use a jig to cut dovetails. Those people are jerks. I'm going to lay my saw down into that
marked line that we made earlier and just push forward a little bit to give
my saw a little groove to set in. I'm gonna bring the
dovetail jig up to my saw, and it's gonna angle it
at the perfect angle. And I'm gonna let the weight
of the saw, do the work. I'm not going to push on it. And this jig has some magnets
that pulls it saw into itself.
I have the outside facing in me, so I'm
going to saw down until I hit my line. And then on the other
side, I can tilt the, saw this way and go down
until I hit that line. I got those three cut so I can
flip the board around and do three more. Next. We can use a coping saw to remove
the waste of the middle two pins. So now I'm gonna remove the
two ends by flipping this over, putting it in the vice, and I can use the shoulder side of the
jig as a guide to cut straight down, Flip it over, do the same thing. Now I can remove the remaining waste by
putting my chisel right into that scribe line and then chiseling down halfway
through. So on this other side, you can work out the middle
just by hand and your chisel. So now I can put my
pinboard into the vice use, the tails as I just cut to
scrub with a marking knife. So this is gonna be our waste.
This is gonna be our waste, and this is gonna be our waste.
And again, I'm gonna use the jig as my training
wheels cut right on the line. Again, we're gonna take our coping,
saw, remove both of the waste with this, and then clean up with the chisel And then just clean out the middle. Usually they don't go together first
time and you might have a little bit of cleanup. It is a little tight. I can see, I need to remove a little bit right
here. Doesn't take a lot of glue, cuz dovetails are naturally strong. If you're anything like me, you
probably have some gaps to fill. So we're gonna throw some
glue and sawdust in there that came out really good, even though
I'm not great at cutting dovetails, filling those gaps with sawdust
and glue made it look pro profesh. This is the second method. This is
probably my least favorite. I just don't.
Don't like handheld routers. They scare
me. They're loud and they're messy. And then there's a lot of
time of setting up the jigs. All the dovetail jigs are kind of
the same. This is the rocker one. I like this because it has
a bunch of accessories. I went ahead and I drew a line,
the thickness of the board on here. So I can go ahead and
clamp the us in the jig. And I center it between
the fingers on here. I already went through all the setup. The funny thing about this is
by the time you set this up, you could have cut a set of
hand, cut dovetails by hand.
But once you get this set up, you can, you can blow through dovetails all day. So if you're a making like kitchen
cabinets or a bathroom vanity, which I am going to do here in a
couple weeks, I will be using this. Then you take your router, you got your eight degree dovetail
bit and you got to set the depth to that line that you drew on there.
This dovetail jig comes with
this bit and this bushing, the bushing is going to ride along
the, the rails here on this jig. So now we're just gonna cut away. This is messy. I don't have my dust collection set up
since I'm just doing two quick cuts on a couple of small boards. Now
it's time to cut the pins. That means I had to swap out the
tail insert for the pin insert. And then I had to put a
straight bit in my router, still with the guide bushing in there. Then I had to set the height to the
line scribed on my board. And again, I'm just going to carve everything
out. Now these are through dovetails. If you do half blind dovetails, you don't have to swap out the inserts
and you don't have to swap bits. You do them both at the same time. And that's exact what I'm gonna do for
the bathroom vanity coming up in a couple of weeks, half the set up half the time.
So much easier with a jig like this.
I, this is actually my very
first time cutting through
dovetails on this particular jig, just cuz it takes so long and I
could do it faster by hand and holy cow, that came out. Absolutely perfect. I mean, That's what I'm doing right now. So let's pull this out a lot of
times you have to make a cut, see how tight it is and adjust
this part of the jig either, either forward or back. So let's see it is a little bit too tight, which means I need to move the template, a hair that way away from
me and we'll do it again. You always wanna do this on scrap first. And that came out really, really good.
Let me throw some finish on there. We have the hand cut dovetail
and the router template dovetail. We've got one more, which is actually my favorite because
I just recently learned how to do it. But before we get to that, I would
like to tell you about today's sponsor.
And that is square
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be links down below. Thank you for Squarespace for
making this video possible. Now let's get to my third and new
favorite way to cut dovetails. This is so nerdy and fun, but
I love it. Check this out. So this third way is at the CNC and
this is my most favorite because I recently had a couple aha moments. And right now this is just the most fun
for me. It's complicated at the CNC. You have to have vertical clamping
and you have to use two bits just like we did with router jig. There is a dovetail gadget for
Vcarve but it's not a true dovetail and it just uses one bit.
It doesn't even really look like
a dovetail for a true dovetail. You gotta do the vertical clamping and
you have to use two different bits. Laney Shay has an amazing two
hour long live video on how to cut dovetails at the C C. It has just
folded so much good information. And I had a couple aha moments and he
uses Vcarve to draw everything out. And I come up with a simplified
version for myself using illustrator and a few less tool
pass than what he uses. He adds extra tool pass
to prevent blowout, but I found if I just slow things down
enough and I got a really sharp bit, I don't get any blowout
and this works great. So if you wanna see a video on the
full process of how to do this for you, CNC nerds like me, I will
make a video on that, but say we're just going to simplify it. So the very first thing I had to do was
I had to put in a bit that I'm not even going to use that has a point on there.
So I can find the zero point
the dadum of my work piece. And I have that vertically clamped
in here and my vertical clamp. And then I have this board double-sided
taped right here and this is just a reference board. So this will set
my height and this will also set my, my left point here for the next board. So I have a dovetail bit in the router.
I drew this up in the illustrator, imported that into V car. It's
just gonna do one straight path, five times through this board without
further ado, let's get started Account really, really good. That
is so fast. Once you get the set up, you can do this all day.
You gotta make sure your clamps aren't
going to get in the way of your tool path. So now we're gonna swap out for the
straight bit and put our other board in there. And U C, C and C. You could see the very simple
tool path that we had it here. So now I am going to load up the
tool path for the second cut, using the straight bit, open that
up. So we got that loaded up. I had to re zero my height, but my X and Y will stay exactly the same
since I had the clamping jig in there. It lays some little fuzzies there.
So I just sand those down real quick. I must have my speeds and feeds dialed
in because there's no backing board on there, but there's no blow. So if you got a nice sharp bit
and you go nice and slow and, and I got one more that uses this
guy, this is a handheld router, but it's got computer brains in there. It's basically a CNC that you run by
hand.
It doesn't allow you to screw up. If you go outside the lines, it'll pull
the bit up. So you can create paths, just like a normal CNC and
import it into the machine. This is called the shaper origin. The people over at shaper tools
created this fusion 360 file, where you can go and change
your parameters, your width, and the thickness of the wood. And it will calculate the paths
for you and you bring it in here. And I had this companion jig
that goes with the machine. I can vertically CLA my pieces
in there and cut pins and tails all day. This thing has a camera built
into it and it reads these domino shapes. So it knows where it's at in the world.
I've got a whole video on this guy. If you want to know more about
it, once I have my file set, I can import them into the machine and
then vertically clamp my tails piece to the jig, install all the dovetail
bit, just like we did at the CNC, run that path.
And then I'm going
to put my pins piece into the jig, install a straight bit and
run that path crazy bonkers. The CNC is the most fun for me just
because it's new and I overcame some obstacle and it was just
kind of fun to figure out. The hand one is also very satisfying and
it's great to know that I can do this by hand.
I've got three videos
on cutting dovetails by hand. The first one is just five minutes long,
and it's a quick refresher for you. The second one goes into a lot more detail
than that is with Jonathan Katz Moses in there. And the third one is also with Jonathan
Katz Moses this and we do this really crazy inlay dovetail thing. It's
bonkers, but it's actually not that hard. And I have a full video on
using the rock dovetail jig, but not for full through dovetails.
I it's for the half blind dovetails, which I mentioned earlier
is a lot quicker and easier. And I got a full video
explained in that process, there is some special soft to
where that you can get for the CNC. That is just for cutting dovetails
plug in your bit degree and number of dovetails that you want. And it figures
out all the calculations for you.
Now, if you wanna spend the money
for that, that's awesome. I just wanted to figure out how to do
it without buying some special software. So that is gonna wrap it. Thank you
squarespace for sponsor. In today's video. I have links to all of the detailed
videos to all of these dove, kale, dove, kale, Hitting a sauce. I have links to all the videos.
I will have links to all the detailed
videos down below, slow down Picciuto. That's it as always be safe, have fun,
stay passionate and make something..