WWGOA GOLD LIVE: Through Dovetails on the Bandsaw

We're goin' live so I'm gonna assume we are live. Today we're coming to you live from my shop in Hanover, Wisconsin. This time we've got Tyler on the camera, Sam is running the boards back in her super-secret Batgirl cave. And I think we're ready to go. We are going to do dovetails on the band saw.

More specifically we're gonna do through dovetails. So one thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna quick scroll through questions here 'cause some people were posting questions before we even started. So I just wanna make sure, see if there's anything I should get ahead of, at this point. So I'm scrolling, scrolling, so I'm not checking my social status on the phone. Okay, well so like, Gareth doesn't really have a question but I'm gonna speak to this 'cause it's interesting.

So he says, "This is a great time for us South Africans, 8:00 pm local time, usually too early for live broadcast. Way past first rounds and airplanes flying overhead." I don't get that part, but Gareth you may not know this but I lived in Swaziland for nearly three years. I was with the Peace Corps over there teaching woodworking in a really rural high school near Pongola but up in Swaziland. What a great experience, I hitchhiked all over South Africa. Durban, Cape Town, Halfway House, Bloemfontein, so anyway, I'm digressing from woodworking here.

So, it's cool that you're watching from South Africa. So, through dovetails on the bandsaw. Through dovetails means when we're done we're gonna see each part of the joint through the other joint. We're gonna see end grain in both directions. So, I have figured out how to do through dovetails, I haven't figured out how to do half-blinded dovetails on the bandsaw, so maybe that will be a future live.

Now, couple things here. Let's do some dovetail info and you're gonna need to know this in order to get to the next step. So, when we do dovetails. I'm gonna go this way so I lock it down better for talking. And then I'll just treat it like a chalkboard Tyler, and start at the top and probably use half of this.

When we talk about dovetails rather than the angle of the tail typically we talk about the slope of the dovetail. And we most commonly separate that into two numbers. Softwood and hardwood. So in softwood, we typically use a slope of one in six and in hardwoods one in eight. And here's what that means.

If you drew a line six inches long and then you draw a line one inch long and you connect the dots, rip this angle is the slope for softwoods. If you a draw a line eight inches long and one inch up, and not freehand with a felt tip, but you know, you lay this out like you supposed to, and connect the dots, this angle will be the angle for hardwoods. Now, the reason that we need to know this is because when we cut on the bandsaw we're gonna take one of our boards and when we make the cuts on that boards, and I'll talk about which board in a second, we have to angle the board left, angle the board right in order to make the cuts. So the question is, how much do we angle it in each direction? And that's where we fall back on this slope idea.

Now if you're already cutting dovetails with a router and router jig, you're probably using a 14-degree dovetail bit. So if you wanna know the angle, I mean, one you can do the geometry here and figure out what that is or somewhere between 12 and 14 degrees is typically the angle. But here's the deal. With the bandsaw table, all bandsaw tables will tilt down to the right. Not every bandsaw table will tilt to the left.

There's a stop on here such that if I do tilt to the right, when I go to the left it locks me in at 90 degrees. I don't wanna mess with that stop to tilt to the left. So instead we're gonna use this really simple jig and again this is where we need to know slope. Here's the way the jig works. When I have this on my bandsaw table just like this, and I put my material on it, my material is now tilted, down angle, down to the right.

Make some cuts. Then when I do this, my material is now tilted down to the right. Did I say that correctly? Angled down to the right, angled down to the left. And I never have to change my bandsaw table.

So this gives me all the angles I need. Slope, when I built this jig because I'm lazy remember slope for softwoods is one in six, slope for hardwoods is one in eight, so lazy shmuck that I am, I made this jig one in seven. Real simple construction. Half-inch Baltic birch, half-inch multiply plywood. I cut this wedge so it's seven inches long, one inch high, connect the dots, make the cut on a bandsaw.

Two of those wedges and when you sandwich them between the top and the bottom it automatically puts you at one in seven. So, this way because it's one in seven I use it for all my bandsaw dovetails I don't go back and forth. I don't have multiple jigs, some of which are one in six, some of which are one in eight. I do everything on here. The other construction thing, it's got a ledge on here so when my material is on there, like that, it's got a shoulder to rest on.

So, a little recap. You gotta understand, you gotta know the numbers for your dovetail slope, then you wanna build this jig so that you can do this and this and make your cuts, right. I'm gonna look at questions quickly. Let's talk about, while the questions are coming up, let's talk about the blade on the bandsaw. I'm using...

Why don't you come in tight on that Tyler, in fact, I'm going to spin a little so you can get a good silhouette of it. So our questions are refreshing. Are you there? Oh yeah. We're gonna use a three sixteenth, 10 tooth per inch blade.

And couple of things goin' on here. You're gonna see in just a little bit when I start making cuts, there's a portion of this joint where I have to turn the corner. That's why we need a relatively narrow blade. The other thing that's key to this is that we wanna go from the blade making the cut to assembling the joint with no intermediate work, we don't wanna go after this with a bench chisel. So 10 TPI because we want the cut quality to be really good so that we have a good join.

If we did this with a four TPI or three TPI the cuts would be so rough that it would look lousy. So three-sixteenths, 10 TPI is a great blade choice for this. All right. Frank asks, "You'll probably answer this. When resizing boards, there is a way or ways to eliminate blade drift.

How much blade drift do you expect in cutting dovetails? Will you be demonstrating how to eliminate blade drift?" No, 'cause it's not an issue. The only time the drift of the blade comes into play is if we're resawing. We not gonna use a fence at all, everything I'm gonna do here is freehand. So, if blade drift on resaw is a thing for you, is an issue, there are a number of videos about that on GOA.

So remember when you go to the homepage, www.goa.com upper righthand corner there's a little window and if you type in their blade drift or bandsaw or whatever you're looking for and hit search, you're searching the entire archive and for especially, for your gold members, what that means is that there is nothing behind a paid wall that you can't get to. So, that's a real powerful tool and you'll find stuff about blade drift. Gary says, "You show a photo of a Japanese saw, can you go into details?" We're concentrating on bandsaw here today, we gonna work on it through dovetails. General questions like this, if you come back for the nighttime GOA guide, which happens to be today at 7:00 pm central time, then we go into more general questions. Okay, we're covered on the questions.

So here's what we've got. Two pieces of poplar and poplar's a wonderful practice wood it's relatively hard, not as hard as a maple, but way harder and more closed grain than something like pine. So it's really good for practicing your joinery, general shop stuff. Glue the pieces together. I practice my turning skills with poplar all the time 'cause it's a great turning wood as well.

So working with poplar, through dovetail. So this component is gonna go all the way through that one, this one is gonna go all the way through that one. Then when we're cutting, we need to know where to stop. What is it that tells us where to stop when I'm cutting in this direction. When I'm cutting pins and sockets or I'm cutting tails, and the answer to that is the thickness of the mating piece.

So as I'm cutting down, I gotta stop at the point which is dictated by the face of this mating piece. Now what I would normally do is use a cutting gauge. And let's do a little... Let's get tight on this if you would Tyler. 'Cause, this is worth a mention.

Tell me when you're there. Got it. And I specifically call this a cutting gauge, not a marking gauge. Look right here. How knifelike that is.

Where a marking gauge would typically have just a spur like almost looks like the tip of a nail there. With a cutting gauge, you get a much better line when you go cross-grain like we're about to do. So if you're doing a lot of layout with hand tools like this cutting gauge is definitely a better choice than a marking gauge. And then just stay where you are. Did I mess you up for a position?

You're good. Okay, using the cutting gauge I'm gonna put the face against the face and set that knife-edge so it's just a tiny bit beyond the face of the piece. I wanna overset this by just a little bit. And then usin' it let the face ride on the end grain and strike a line and I don't know if you can hear that but I can hear the sound of a good cut? It's just like I'm dragging a knife across there.

Now the downside to this in this setup is I can see that line you probably can't, so I'm just gonna pull my pencil through it, so you can see what I'm looking at. Both pieces are the same thickness so I'm gonna do the exact same thing to the other piece. And if all I were doin' was cutting for me, not for you, I wouldn't do the pencil step, we don't need it. But because I want you to be able to see what I'm working on, we do need it. Now one of the things that's neat about getting to hold of this technique is that you have full control of the layout.

So even if you own a good dovetail jig, if on your jig the comb, the template, if the fingers were in a fixed position, which means every dovetail you cut, I'm holding a router, every dovetail you cut is gonna look exactly the same. This is a good technique to learn because it's gonna allow you to vary the spacin'. You can be creative with your layout. The other thing that's cool about it is that not every dovetail jig will do through dovetails, it's very common for them to do half-blind, and this lets us do through. So, vary the spacin'.

We could do whatever we want to. We gonna layout first the pins and sockets. And I'm gonna do that simply by putting a square on here, making a line. This is the half pin on the outside of the join. I'm gonna eyeball a half-pin over here.

And then somewhere here in the middle and I'm not even measuring I'm just doin' everything by eye. I'm gonna do this again. Here's what that gives us. Half pin, full pin, half pin, waste, and waste. Those are the parts that we're about to cut out.

Next, we're gonna do some cutting. So I'm gonna look again at questions, so I'm keeping up with ya. Let's talk about the pencil for a second. When you're laying this out, now this again you could be doin' these lines with a marking knife, not a pencil, if you're doing them with a pencil like I just did, good quality pencil, so good hard lead. And then I've got a sanding block here, not 'cause I'm gonna sand the join but because every once in a while I'm gonna take my pencil and do this and that's gonna keep the tip of that pencil just needle-sharp.

If your line on here looks like a crayon made it it's gonna be impossible to get a good quality cut. What we're doing here really emulates the same technique I would do if I was laying out a joint I was about to hand cut. Whoops, went too far. Gary says, "Let us know about your boo boo." I'm assuming you mean this. So, I'm in week seven of eight, of having my fingers, no, week six of having my fingers buddy taped.

I stretched two ligaments right there nothing to do with... Nothing sexy, nothing to do with woodworking, or running a chainsaw or fixing a car or saving a life, or it's just a stupid, actually a dog walking accident. So, it's been a huge pain in the butt to have my three fingers taped. You can imagine me typing with three fingers taped together it's very creative typing. However, the hand surgeon's hope is that by keeping these wrapped together for eight weeks the ligaments are gonna heal on their own and there doesn't have to be surgery.

I can't imagine me having surgery and then being in a hand cast for like six weeks. That'll be a train wreck. So, cautious optimism we're hoping this doesn't. It was at least like a really big dog, right? It was a 70-pound German shepherd if that makes us feel better.

But you know, it was stupid, so. Okay, here's a thing. When you do through dovetails, hand-cut or bandsaw cut, you can choose to do the tails first or the pins and sockets first. When I did hand tool joinery overseas with Peace Corps I was taught to do the pins and sockets first and that's the approach I've stuck with. So, here I just got done laying out half pin, full pin, half pin, sockets are the waste wood in between.

So we're gonna do pins and sockets first because I said so and that's all the more reason you need... This is where we use our jig. And I'm gonna... If you can come down there on the jig Tyler. Yep.

Right now the board is angled down to the left, to my left. So when I use it I'm gonna cut the line on the left side of the socket and this line on the left side of the socket. Cutting in until I get to the baseline, here. Then I'm gonna turn this and we're gonna cut the line on the right side of the socket and on the right side of the socket cutting to the baseline. Then when we're gonna be done with this jig.

So what that does is when we're angled in this direction, we get a cut like this, when we're angled in this direction we get a cut like this, how did I do? Very sloppy, but that's what gives us the dovetail shape starting to form on the pins and sockets. So everything from here Tyler's gonna be on the bandsaw. So I do need a second to reposition. Are you happy?

Do you wanna come in and get over it more, or are you happy? So let's come in and get over it a little bit more. Right, so let's give Tyler a second to regroup. Sorry folks. It's not great castors on my mobile camera gizmo so.

There we go. I'm looking at questions so scream. You're ready? Ready. Okay, lower my guard a little bit.

Now one of the things to watch for here is this is all about good control of the board. So I'm gonna anchor the heels of my hands and I'm gonna control this with just my fingers. Rather than letting my hands move free, then I'm controlling this with my arms. You're gonna get better small movements by anchoring and pushin' with your fingers. Let your fingers do the walkin', Tyler doesn't know what that means.

Here we go. Cutting on the lay side of the line. Cutting the line on the right side of the join. Cut the line on the right side. Change my angle.

Cut on the left side. Cut on the left side. And you can just stay put Tyler, 'cause we're gonna come right back to some cuts. There you can see better now, the angles that are formed in order to get the dovetail going. The sparks that you're seeing, that's 'cause there's ceramic guides on this particular saw it's not a bad thing.

It's just 'cause that metal blade is rubbing on ceramic guides so every once in a while you get a spark. Here's what happens next. I come in, not on that line, not on that cut, but adjacent to it, turn and pick up the baseline. This is why we need a three sixteenth's blade, so I can come in and make that pretty small, pretty tight turn. Then I'm gonna cut cut cut on the baseline and look what's gonna happen when I get to the end, the waste is not gonna fall out because the blade is plum, the internal cut is at an angle.

As a result, I gotta lift this just a little bit at the end to finish, just like that. The guard is up higher than I like it, but if I put it down where I want it which would be here someplace, you can't see any of this. So I'm gonna leave it up a little higher than normal. Come in, make the curve, take the turn. Get on the baseline, let your fingers push.

Lift, the same thing in the opposite direction. Don't you love brakes on bandsaws? Isn't that amazing, how fast that stops it. Those cuts are done. Now of everything we're doin' I think this is the hardest part, because this cut has to be nice and straight because eventually, it's gonna marry to the face of the other piece.

And if you're all jiggedy jaggedy, that's gonna show up. If this is crooked and that's flat, that's gonna show up. So we're gonna talk about alternative approaches here when we get done. Pins and sockets are done. Now the reason that we can be loosey-goosey with the layout is we're just gonna put those pins and sockets on this board.

I don't know what's the best way for you Tyler? Maybe this way? I'm gonna trace. Yep. I'm lining up my face, the back face of the board with the pencil line or the marking knife line, marking gauge.

Then uber sharp pencil, trace, trace, uno dos, trace, trace. And then we have tails, and they've gotta be a perfect match for the pins and sockets because we traced the pins and sockets. Waste wood, waste wood, waste wood. All right, want you to zoom out for a moment, Tito. And we'll see if there are questions.

Or answers, or smart comments. Or all of the above, I don't know. All right, we're still good. No new questions. At this point, so here's what I would do.

If you're doing a four-sided box, your gonna do this cut four times. I would do all the pins and sockets, then trace them onto the tailboards. And when you do that I would label 'em, if this is number one, that tailboard is number one. Because they're probably... Even if you laid 'em out, you know, even if you measured and laid 'em out, from cutting you're gonna have small variations in the joint.

So they gonna become corner specific. So I would do all the layout then, all the tracing, then start all the tails. Once we're done with these cuts, we're also done with this jig, we don't need this anymore. Now, this is where the rubber really meets the road on your cuts. When I learned to do hand tool joinery, when I learned to hand-cut dovetails, one thing is read said when you get to this step, you've traced the pins and sockets, you about to cut the tails, cutaway half the pencil line.

And I'm looking at the pencil like, what is that, 80 billioneth of an inch wide? How do I cut half of 80 billioneth of an inch? However, what I learned is that that's accurate. If you leave the full pencil line behind it's probably gonna be too tight. If you take the whole pencil line off it's probably gonna be too loose.

So, when you start working on this, try to keep that concept in your head. Again, sharp pencil, very fine line, try to take away half the line. This is where things are really critical because we're cutting to match something that already exists. Here we go. Let me know when you're snug as a bug in a rug on that.

We're snug as a bug in a rug. All right. Half the pencil line he says. Inside here now I gotta turn and cut like I did on the other one. But we don't have to lift.

'Cause, we're not going into an angle cut. All right. That completes our work. Now one of the things that I said is we'll talk about some alternatives to this whole thing. So, one of the problems here is getting these cuts nice and straight with that small bandsaw blade.

So an alternative would be, do this cut on the bandsaw and then do these cuts with a hand chisel. Which if you were doing hand tool joinery completely that's how you'd be cleaning out the bottoms of the sockets. The other thing we could do is there are ways that you can use dado heads on table saws to do the pins and sockets. And then you could trace 'em and only do the tails here on the bandsaw. So one of the things to keep in mind here is that if you kinda put your woodworking thinking cap on there are different ways you can use what I just showed ya combined with other techniques to still make this happen.

Here's the thing, this is a joint that takes a lot of practice because we're cutting straight lines they've gotta be good straight lines so that when we're ready to put this together it goes together. And we don't have to come in here and tweak positioning with a hand chisel or something. So, one of the things in woodworking we forget sometimes is that, think of it like playing a guitar, you not gonna just pick up a guitar, you're not gonna just buy a bandsaw, and be able to play Johnny Cash. You're not gonna be able to buy a bandsaw and just cut through dovetails. You've gotta take the time to practice this stuff before you need the skill.

So I think as woodworkers we have a tendency to like, "I wanna make a box, I wanna have bandsaw dovetails on it so I'm gonna build the box, which is a gift for my kid, and I'm gonna do bandsaw dovetails for the very first time ever." And what we're really doing is opening the door to be really frustrated because this skill, like all skills, takes practice. I burned a lot of these in a fireplace before I was willing to do this in front of people. What's cool about it is we get through dovetails, you can do variable spacing. If you don't own a dovetail jig but you do own a bandsaw then you've got the tool that you need already to do this. A limitation on this process is this.

So yeah, probably good if you sneak in there again Tyler. Half of our cuts have to be done with the board between the blade and the riser on your bandsaw. Same with this piece. So the pieces can only be up to this long. Because we've got to be able to fit 'em in here.

All right, let me scroll the questions again. All right, so last step. Let's see if I succeeded in this. It's only going to go together one way because I did a random layout on this which I then traced on this. So in this direction, they're not even close to fitting.

In this direction theoretically. Little tight. All right, now when I started this I said set the marking gauge so it's a little more then the thickness of our material, that's what we want, look at this, I do that on purpose. So you glue this together then you come back with a block plane or a sander or a something and you clean this excess off to bring it down to flush. So very intentionally letting the end grain of each component, project passed the face grain of the other.

And that my young friends, is our through dovetail on a bandsaw. All right, if you've got a question this would be the time to quick jump on there and post it. And I'll say, I'll tell you again, general questions, general woodworking stuff if you wanna come back tonight. Now if you're watching the archive version of this video a week from now, this is not the case. If you're watching today, September 19th, 2018, 7:00 pm tonight central time is our standard wwgoa live Q&A same bat location.

So, if you have general questions you can come back then. Bill says, "Would it make sense to cut the waste out for the pins with the boards placed on the jig? Doing so would eliminate the need to tilt the board." Yeah, you wouldn't have to tilt the board but I don't find tilting the board to be a problem. So, here's what I would do. Try it that way in your world and see which one you like better.

Try it both ways. For me what I do is I cut to the inside corner I can see and then right at that end, I'm rockin' it up to finish and I find that works fine. But you're right if you cut 'em in the jig, you wouldn't have to rock. So if that works for you, cool. "With an angled cut into an angled cut, do you mark sides, inside and out before starting?" Robert says, "With an angled cut into an angled cut, do you mark sides, inside and out before starting?" Oh, if you mean like a good face?

Yeah, so normally if I'm makin' a drawer or a jewelry box or whatever the first step is gonna be, I'm gonna take all my boards and separate show face from inside face. So that as I'm laying out I know which face I wanna have it on the outside of the piece when it's all done. That would happen before I even start my dovetail layout. If that's what you mean, I think that's what you mean. All right, I'm gonna do one more refresh.

"How do you deal with the board too long to fit in the throat of the bandsaw?" You don't do bandsaw dovetails. You pick a different method. You can't, you just can't do on the bandsaw. Okay, well that wraps us up and then if you're watchin' live, keep in mind we archive these things. So you can always come back and watch it later, of course, then you can hit the pause button, if you wanna concentrate on a particular aspect of the technique.

Other than that we are done. Thanks to Tyler for the great job on the camera, Sam for the great job on running the boards and keeping us moving in a forward interwebs connection and that's it, we'll see you next time.