Make Dovetail Sockets on Your Table Saw

If you're on pins and needles about pins and sockets on your table saw, so on a dovetail joint, the hollow that we cut is the socket, adjacent to those are the pins, just in case my joke didn't make sense, we can do dovetail pins and sockets on the table saw. What we need in order to do this is a very, very simple shop-made jig, just a big L shape. This is made out of three quarter inch plywood, tall back, narrow foot. We're gonna set our material in that in order to make our cuts. Screws in the back because eventually I'm gonna fasten it to my miter gauge.

When I do, we're gonna set the miter gauge at an angle. Talk about that in a sec. In order to do this, we want a dado head in the saw. So here's where we're going in more of a big picture. This is the board into which I'm gonna cut my pins and sockets.

The X indicates waste. That's where I'm gonna cut. Make that layout whatever you want. Once you've got your layout and you know what your waste is, that's gonna help you decide how big a dado head I put in the table saw because we want the dado head wide enough to not spend four years cutting all the sockets out. So right now I've got a five eighths inch wide dado head in there.

So in just a few passes, we'll be able to take the waste out of each of those sockets. The height of the dado head is the base of our jig plus the thickness of our material. So where we're going with that is that we want the depth of that socket to be able to receive the mating piece plus a little bit. I like when I make dovetails to allow the end grain of this, the pin to go slightly past the face grain of the mating piece, the tailpiece, and then after it's glued together I trim that off. So set the height so that the height of that blade is a little bit more than the cumulative thickness of this and this.

Gonna fasten this, get it all put together. And then set my miter gauge to 12 degrees. 12 degrees is a good angle for dovetails. We talk a lot about dovetail slope, one and six, one and eight and 12 degrees is a good middle ground for that. The way we'll take advantage of the jig is put our layout line on the jig where the dado head made that cut like that, turn on the saw, all that goes through.

Then move over a little bit, move over a little bit, but keep in mind that on this line, the angle has got to go the other way. We're gonna end up on the other side of the dado head. So we don't want to come too far in this direction because it's possible to over-cut and take away wood that has to be on the backside of this opposing tail. So just a cut or two from this side, and the way I remember this is that the line on the right goes on the right. And then when we're over here it's gonna be just the opposite.

That line on the left, the left side of the waste, is gonna go on the left of our cut on the other side of the jig. Do your alignment. Lift, don't back up. Next one. Oops, missed that line.

Let's talk for a second about this don't back up business. Obviously I'm backing up the miter gauge. The reason I can do that is because the fence is firmly fixed to the miter gauge. So it can only go in one unique path. With your board that you're cutting, if you make a cut and then accidentally let's do this, make a cut and then that moves just a tiny bit to the right inadvertently and you start to back up, it's gonna climb on the blade and get thrown at you.

So when a board is not firmly fixed in place, you want to remove it, bring the fixture back, make your next cut. If these two were clamped together, then we'd be able to pull the board back with the jig but because I'm just handholding, you don't want to do that. All right, I am going to switch to the other side and then we're gonna kind of rinse and repeat here. That gives us half pin, full pin, full pin, half pin, socket, socket, socket. From here, all right so a good question would be now can I do tails on the table saw.

The problem with that is when you angle the blade to 12 degrees, you can't end up with a clean inside corner on the tails because the tip of the cutters are perpendicular to the plane of the blade. So from here, my answer is I take this and I trace it onto it's mating board and either hand cut those tails or bandsaw cut those tails in order to finish this joint off. It's a really good and quick way to do your pins and sockets with the dado head on the table saw.