Trimming Dovetails: Block Plane
George VondriskaEveryone loves the look of dovetail joinery, so it makes sense to fine tune your ability to create this great joint. There are a number of important steps involved in creating the joint in your woodworking projects, but one that is commonly not given enough attention is the process of making the joint flush. After the mating pieces come together, it is typical that the pins protrude slightly above the surface of the tails, as it is a lot easier to remove material from the tops of the pins than it is to remove from the entire drawer or box side. If you know how to use a block plane, correcting this can be straightforward.
One common approach that woodworkers use to flush dovetail joints is to use a power sander, but this can leave rounded corners and a dull surface finish. That’s why many craftsmen choose to use a block plane for this process. A blockplane leaves a crisp corner and lustrous surface finish if you know how to use a block plane and follow a few key steps.
Choose the right block plane
There are many types of block planes to choose from, and some are better than others for planing the end grain on dovetail pins. Choosing the right tool and knowing how to use a block plane will reduce the risk of tear-out and improve your surface finish.
Cutting direction matters
There is a proper technique for doing this that yields great results, and lots of ways to do it wrong that will cause frustration. George will show you what to do and what not to do.
Patience and practice
Knowing how to do this is an important first step, but the only way to get good at this is to practice and be patient with yourself.
When I put a through dovetail together, the way I do that is to allow the end grain of each mating part project past the face grain of the other. So in this case, I've got my pins showing through the face grain of the tailboard. Glue is dry, we're ready for the next step. The next step is how do we clean these up without messing this up. We wanna keep the corner nice and crisp.
A really good way to do this is to use a block plane. Let's be a little bit more specific, this is called a low angle block plane. Let me open this up so you can see what I'm talking about. Low angle, just like the name says. Our plane iron is in the body of the plane at a very low angle.
A lot of times it's about 12 degrees or so. So we have the right tool, that's good. If your block plane has the ability to open and close the throat... So by that I mean, when I loosen this knob, I can turn this and that allows me to change that position. When we're cutting end grain like we're about to do, we like that opening to be fairly narrow.
And for starting, I'm gonna have that so it's barely penetrating past the bottom of the plane, the sole of the plane. And let's see if anything happens here. Not enough to be worth talking about. I'm gonna advance my iron and this is what we wanna do. We wanna start with a really light pass, do some test cuts, that feels pretty good.
I'm just barely skinning wood off of this. All right, now let's talk about the approach that leads to success. Notice that I'm cutting from the outside in, not from the inside out. What's the deal with that? If I cut from the inside out, there's a chance that I'm gonna flake, I'm gonna chip a piece of my material off of this face.
By working outside in, it's not gonna happen. The other thing is that watch this motion real carefully. I'm not holding the plane perpendicular to the edge and just blasting straight through. I'm skewing the plane and as I make the cut, it's more of a slicing cut. I'm not just moving straight across that pin.
That lets a couple things happen. One is it makes this a lot easier to do because of that slicing motion, takes less cutting pressure. I'm gonna give myself a little more iron there. And it give us much better surface finish across that end grain. What's nice about this is we can do this with a hand tool.
We don't have to fire up a noisy power tool to make this happen. If you're careful, we can very quickly, just in the time I was talking to you, brought that down, very quickly bring those pins down to where they're flush with the face grain. Now, being careful, what I'm looking for when I stop and check my work here is wanna make sure that's still proud of the face. I don't want the iron, plane iron, to start cutting into the face of that tailboard. That looks good.
Now, on that last half pin on the outside you gotta be really kind of double careful. I'm going in this way and in this way. Same thing, to make sure that I don't chip this on the outside faces. Nice. Little bit of practice, low angle block plane provides a really effective way to clean up those pins and tails to make sure that everything is nice is flush and the joint looks great when you're done.
Hi sir, could you please share the plane make for us? Thank you in advance!