now we're going to put this one piece this
was the piece I used there's only a slight variance in thickness here what
we're gonna do is place the plane here this is very common I didn't invent this
this has been done ever since people made dovetails I'm pretty sure I use my
plane it's a level this piece move it out over here so that you can
rest this piece onto that end grain here and then I'm not focusing really on this
outside rim so much as this inside corner here I'm making sure that this
line here lines up with this inside face of my box the outside if this was
overhanging I can just plane that off later
now in most books many books it'll probably say use a knife to go along the
side I prefer not to do that on pine because it closes up I've got my pencil
super sharp so I now keep my finger on here keep it in firm in place and I'm
making a pencil line across here and then right in this corner I make a
second one that gets me the exact dovetail I'm gonna make an A on here
or a B whichever you want and I'm gonna make an A on here so I know that this is
a matched corner I have to square down here I can do this two ways I can use my
finger as a finger guide like this that keeps me parallel or I could reach for
the square or I could use my dovetail template whichever one I want make sure
you square a square because you want this to be perfectly parallel to this
long edge here I just run that line along there
and you want them to line up on the corners here you see that and the same
on this one so if those line up you know that you can follow those lines the most
important one is to follow this one here and this one here mark and X I'm here
just in case you don't want to cut these off on the outside which often happens
for some strange reason but now we're going to make our saw kerf and the saw
kerf needs to be on this side of the line and this side of the line you're
not trying to split the lines at all that's the very last thing you want a
lot of times people think you're trying to split the line but this pencil line
doesn't go underneath the dovetail it's at the side of it so we leave that line
in we cut this one first so thumb along the side of the saw exactly to the angle with no
variance just rub the saw until you penetrate it like that I'm looking at my
line making sure I'm staying parallel now I'm focusing on the vertical wall
not the dovetailed angle because it's not going to change but the vertical
wall could so now I place again my thumb right on the side and I'm angling the
saw slightly inclined this way so that I can start on the back and lower my
hand to drop directly to the line so I instead of trying to get it parallel
this way I just with each successive stroke now I can look at that line and
follow that line perfectly so right in the corner I can see the parallel soccer
with the line exactly and now I focus on my vertical cut like this down to just above my line now
I have to remove that midsection here so this I'm going to now make a knife wall
across here so the piece that I just cut I can now use my fingertips to line up
the outside face like this now I go right on this inside corner here like
this gently gently with the first pass then I go heavily again and then the
last one I can go as heavily as I like it will not move that knife wall and
this is important now to transfer to the other side I want a perfect line so I
make a knife cut and now a Knick right in the corner just a very small nick
lift up and I slide my knife into that Nick move my square up to the edge like
this and make a second Nick on the opposite side that gives me the exact
square line that I need to to now set this square on the other side into that
nick with my knife slide up and then right between the two saw kerfs so I go
gently gently gently and then a little bit heavier and and that's my final pass
with that now I go to my chisel and I'm going to chisel out the midsection like
this I go in my vise now you'll notice here that I've not gone level in my vise
I'm angling down slightly so put your chisel right between the soccer on the
side of the soccer and about 1/8 of an inch from that cut line the knife wall
and then just rock the chisel you're not trying to hit the knife wall
you're just trying to use the bevel of the chisel just to split the surface
fibers to establish the knife wall a little bit deeper and then right at this
point I just use my thumb and I just break off and that will naturally break
down to the vertical cut depth that I made
now I flip over and then exactly the same way I come in from this side about 1/8
from that just rock your chisel and then I move over 1/2 a chisel width and
do the same so I've established my knife wall and now I'm going to make vertical
chopping cuts here and so I'm gonna slide my chisel right onto that knife
wall like this just just chop but this is a gentle chop this isn't you're not
trying to get to any depths at this point just I go so I listen for that
sound because I don't want to go beyond that move the chisel over use the same
because if I hit it harder of course I could hit it harder and I could go in
1/8 of an inch with a super-sharp chisel but I could be moving that knife wall
and that's what I don't want to do and now I turn over you can see how I think
you can see how crisp this inside corner is here where I've chiseled so that's
gone in now about a little over a sixteenth of an inch probably so I'm
going to do the same from this this side here the vertical chop no compensation and as I go deeper I'll be able to hit
just a little bit harder with each depth now I want to keep this outside rim here
because as I flip over and go deeper this will stop this from levering and
tearing out the end grain fibers hard to understand that really at this
point but as you do this you'll understand what I'm talking about so
here I come away from my knife wall now well I'm probably half the length of my
recess and I just Rock my chisel like this move over to the other side and do
the same use and you can flick these now and what that flick will do it'll take
you down to the exact depth it goes down to the depth of that knife cut so we're
about three thirty-seconds deep here almost 1/8 deep already and this is only
1/2 inch so theoretically we're about quarter of the way through pine works
really nicely for this and it's a wonderful practice wood but it's also a
wonderful permanent wood it's no less of a wood than the hardwoods are you could
use a wider chisel for this I would probably suggest you stay I'm using a
3/4 inch chisel so I don't have as much resistance that's the reason and then I
go half a chisel width that helps me maintain the line of the knife wall the
other thing is I'm slightly inclined this way to compensate for the wall of
the dovetail so I think that's important to chop the other side in the vise this is a safety thing you
really want to go in and out of the vise no chopping towards your hand a lot of
times I see people doing this this is probably very dangerous especially with
the super sharp chisels that we're using so I'm moving away from my line again
this keeps that long grain which is much easier to cut than trying to cut down
this way I'm almost through really now so again move away from your
wall and now I'm chopping see where my fingertips are – my fingers are way down
here I'm not holding it this way very hard to control your vertical cut this
way so come right in here and I'm angling over because of the depth now
that I've gone to right in the corner right into this corner and then take
down the middle section like this and listen it still sounds quite firm but
when I go from this side that may change so here I'm going to go down with a
vertical cut no compensation for the bevel or for the angle of the detail this is changing so let me turn this
around so you can see what's happening here so I'm chiseling this way watch
what happens here yeah I'm through there so now I can go to this one maybe not a
full width because the grain varies and then here so now I've severed through
this wall here and I've got a little bit of fiber here to remove and I do that from the vise again so I use my chisel just
inside here lift out those fibers clean up clean up chisel off any belly in there
if there is some there's a little slight belly not very much thank you so that the joint seeks tight
up against this shoulder line place the dovetail on and just check yourself
don't just press in now what I do on all my dovetails it's a signature of my work
and lots of people have signatures of their work I choke up on my chisel and I
take off just a little bit of this inside corner without touching this
outside face I take off just a very tiny amount and what this does it gives me a
slight lead in to my dovetail it's not very much place this on and it see it's
automatically started see already I'm only in quarter of an inch and this is
self-supporting here so what I do now this is important too instead of
just pressing I waggle this end just about half an inch and I press with my
thumb you can hear it going and that's my
dovetail cut nice clean crisp lines and then I would probably tap use it I've
got a thorax hammer here it's the seven one two and it has a soft face and a
hard face the hard face for the chisel the soft face for assembly and that's my
dovetail cut so we've got four of those to do on this box
so now we'll cut the other four I've got two fitted and these are fitted before
so these are the first ones something about pulling your joints together and
pressing them home when you have this completed it just is so rewarding I use
the soft face again just to make sure everything is seated and you can use a
block of wood if you don't have you can use a hard faced hammer like this I
still use that even without a block of wood if I'm careful we just use a block
of wood these nubs are protruding just slightly
which is exactly how I like them so on here what I would do now because I'm
going to be gluing this together shortly I would put this in the vise like this
and because I want to clamp this in the vise when I'm done I put this in the
vise like this and just take the corner of my chisel and I place it right on
here and I just use the slicing action this pine slice is very nice and it's a
circular motion really so then I go to the outside edge I take off the bulk of
the waste and then I place my chisel on here and I just slice cut into that
opposite face so this is dead flush now I have a slight high spot there so I
come in from this face and I just rotate the outside corner of my chisel into
that edge there's no resistance and actually I could go all the way through
I'm just worried that your chisels may not be quite as sharp as mine and if
they're not this outside edge here will split off so here see the thumb on top
let me see if I raise this just a little bit so you can see this technique which
is important for you to understand I put my thumb on the top of my chisel and I
choke up with my finger here hitting the the rim of the box that stops me from
overshooting so my hand is actually both hands are behind the cutting edge this
is a safety issue and safety is of course of concern to me but it's also
your responsibility so I just use this thumb to press down I went all the way
through there with no visible breakout and I come in here again thumb on top of
the chisel it's just pressing it flat so I'm using this dead flat surface and
then that's come in from the outside edge you can hear that maybe I can hear
it the annual rings are so close together there are ten or fifteen annual
rings in that half inch which means that's 15 years of growth in half an inch of
wood so just to make sure this is not going
to be stopping the seating of the joint these are already flush here now I can
take this put it into the vise here and I can press this shut now if you don't
have a vise that's big enough that's not a problem you can just simply use some
clumps and I'll probably I think you you know you probably will have you could
clump this in a black & decker workmate or something like that that would work
perfectly the jaws on the Black & Decker anything really if you don't have the
vise so all my joints are seated here I'm looking let's see where my knife is I'm
looking in here to make sure that this joint line is pristine that there's no
gap in here because if this if this end of this piece was slightly bellied it
would reveal a gap there this one is crisp perfect line and no gap and the
same on this one this nub just protrudes a little bit more so I'm going to trim
that down but I could do that after I've glued up I just like to get things into
place as early as I can and just taking this down now so I've got these side
clamped and I've got this clumped in the vise so I just bring my chisel in one
big continuous arc like this go towards the outside edge but not into it here I
can go through because it's supported by this edge of the pin and then here I
just want this edge in here that feels just lovely to me and
now I'm dead flush here this one's a little protruding so I know I'm ready to
glue up and that's what I'm going to do I'm going to take this apart I've marked
all the outside joints here B to B X to X and C to C I usually don't mark the D
because of D when I make my DS I make my D like this well that can also look just
like an A so I avoid using the D so I usually go ABC X and that's just
convenient for me and that's the predominant number of parts that you
have so let's glue this up and I'll show you how to do that now we break this
apart very carefully and I'm going to leave this no not I'm going to leave
this in the vise with these two components here and I'm gonna use some
glue and I keep my glue sticks ready here so I'm going to split this
one like this and then I take a bead I've got a little bit of fiber inside this corner
here it might just hold me off so put a bead of glue you can put it in the
recess or you can put it on the stick itself just like that and then place
this into the recess and pull it just pull it up the wall just like this here
watch just pull it up the wall and across the bottom here again up the wall up the wall across the bottom now I'm
also going to glue the sides of my dovetail here and I'll do that outside
shoulder not really necessary on there I don't do this face because that glue
is in the bottom of my recess so I'm not going to do that one and then on to this shoulder c2c so I
can oops I can close that up remember that
this glue is always swelling your material so you want to get this
together quite quickly make sure it's seated and you can pull the glue off
here use that in the other side I'm gonna put this in the vise now I've got
those together I'm not really too worried about them now exactly the same
remember gluing up is the point of no return so try to usually it is you can
reverse it sometimes you just work quickly and methodically and it's good
to practice and rehearse this this point in your project just practice put it
together even feign putting the glue on doesn't do any harm it'll give you some
idea it gets your fine motor moving and adjusted this is good
for children too to practice a rehearsal like this so A goes to A so I've got
that one in, tap down and then remove the excess again like I
said just take it off make sure it's underneath the bench where it needs to
be remember if you get it on your fingertips like this just wipe it off
rub rub it off this PVA just peels off your fingertips now I'm going to put
this into the vise like this now you may as I say you may have to use clumps to
do this my advice is just about perfect and I'll see this glue squeeze out at
the ends here and that's what I want I want to squeeze off the excess the
thinner the film of glue usually that's the better the joint now I check one
more thing I go from corner to corner internal corner with my tape so I'm one
on three sixteenths there and I'm one and three sixteenths there so I'm dead
square there is no question really of whether I'm square so I can leave this
now in the vise my joints were tight enough so I would probably only need to
leave it for half an hour or something like that so we'll leave that for half
an hour and while that's curing we can get ready to
make the bottom to go on the box I need a good sharp plane to plane up
the surfaces of the outside of the box we glued up good sharp chisel as well
I've already sharpened that set my plane ready I'm listening for
sound gauging the thickness of the set the depth of the cut by the sound now
I've taken up the slack and I'm taking up the excess and going for super-fine shaving
so I got more on the Left than the right close what we're gonna do now on the
box we got to level the surface here we've got to clean up the outside of the
box we use the plane almost like an eraser to erase little dimples in the
wood pencil marks the excess is on the ends of the nubs and so on but when the
nubs are actually protruding like these are ever so slightly protruding I
usually put this in the vise and remove as much of that as I can and to do that
I use a three-quarter inch chisel like this one here and I take the chisel I
press down with my thumb on the top and I make a little arched movement like
this and because this chisel is super sharp
it's just pairing this a little bit like peeling butter then I come in in another
movement coming in towards the body of the wood like this so I've just got a
little bit left on the corner so here thumb down on the top and then just take
off that nub there I've done this for so many years and it really works very well
I haven't found anything that works better than this really same again and this prepares me what
this does it is it lowers the amount of hardness that the plane hits which I
like the idea of it keeps my plane from being damaged around round the box with
the chisel being sharp it usually doesn't break off on this outside edge
down here if my chisel was dull you can probably see here when I've pared down
this surface is perfectly level I can't actually feel any difference I can feel
a texture difference but on here I've got a pencil line it's not a gap but
those pencil lines are along the grain and it's best to plane a long grain the ends too a little bit wider area here
a bit more to pair off don't put too much pressure on your vise because you
can you can dimple the wood so you want to be careful of that but just enough to
secure it and then just peel this pair it with the chisel like this these are
techniques really so you'll notice that when I'm pairing here I'm pairing from
this outside edge along here in towards the main mass of wood and that way I
don't get any breakout on that outside edge and I'll show you a technique for
making sure when you plane this end that we don't have any breakout from the
plane to because these are hard to land the plane on and plane the surface with again but you can see how you can see how how
sharp this chisel is too and so keep your fingers behind the cutting edge you know
when I put my thumb on here it's usually at the side it's not usually towards
here because you'll cut inside that corner of your hand between your thumb
and your first finger all right so I'm ready to plane this and then what I'm
going to do is I'm going to plane the ends first and to do that I need a
second piece of wood as a sacrificial piece on this end just to cover it just
needs to be enough to cover the bulk of the dovetail area this end the two sides
are not going to break so I open my vise up slide this as low in the vices I can
get it so that the main stem of the vise is actually compressed between these two
and not the I don't to compress the long walls at all so this is just slightly
above the end grain of this so the the sacrificial block is slightly higher so
I plane that down now like this so I'm level now now the outside of my box is
flat we already planed the surface so I'm gonna work from left to right I
could work from right to left but it's a habit of mine so I go here move across
and I take this down I'm already there there's nothing else I can do I can't
even feel a texture difference on this end and I don't know if you can see in
here but you can see a perfectly tight joint line that's because we use the
knife wall the knife wall is so critical so I'm going to do the other end while
my vise is set and plane this end and then I all I have to do then is go to
240 250 grit sandpaper so I'm planing the end of my box I'll
learn my plane on this short runway if you like plane the surface is out I've
used a sacrificial piece and as you can see what it did is it saved this piece
which is very critical on the corner of the box so I've got a perfectly crisp
clean line here but look where I've got the ragged edge is on the outside out
out thrust of the plane on this outside part of the wood and that's a little
technique I think that will help you in the future when you've got short pieces
to plane now when I have planed this I'm going to sand this with 240-250 grit
sandpaper somewhere in that region and the reason I do is because my plane is
15 this is sharpen to 15 thousand grit so I'm actually going to roughen the
surface and that helps the finish that we put on to meld with the surface of
the wood now I'm clumping this in the vise I've got the bottom rail the
opposite of this clamped in the vise I can't get it all the way down I would
like to but I don't need to so I'm going to I'm going to feign this these shot
these strokes just to show you how I handle my plane as I'm doing this I
can't I cannot plane from here all the way through here because it's going to
trip on this and it's going to split these outside unsupported and grain
fibers so the important thing is to go part way I go from here about 2/3 of the
longer start to lift my plane up lift the heel of the plane and just follow
through so I go here just as all you swinging a golf club when you're
practicing you go through here and lift off go through here and lift off and
then we'll work from the other end and that will give us a perfect surface so
let me show you another thing too is sometimes this will be either belly door
it'll press down as you're planing so a good trick here is to take another that
sacrificial piece of wood if it works put this between the two this end in the
vise and this is actually clamping the bottom of my piece of wood so I can
press down here so that now caused a belly on here
and and so when I plane here now I have a slight belly so watch what happens I
take the nubs first I go to this one and then I go to this one so these are flush
then I go one two three back again you can go as many times as I want now I'm
gonna go this side and work from this end the same again but I've got a little
bit of a Ridge there so one swipe and that got rid of it so now I'll show you
the dovetails now that they've been planed and again I've got these
beautiful crisp lines around my dovetails here and here and I've got a
perfectly smooth surface this feels literally like a piece of glass so one
more face to do here's slide this piece in make sure one of these ends is in the
vise you don't have to have both and press down here just to create the belly
and this belly is only slight so one two and you almost have to you have to check
your grain direction this is planing fine in this direction sometimes it
won't plane from this end and that can present a problem so that would be a
question of trying to work with the grain as close as you can to here and
sometimes you may even have to sand because you can't plane it
