Inlay Dovetails Made Simple.

Hi, I'm Jonathan Katzmoses, and today we're going to cut some inlaid dovetails. Today I'm going to show you how to cut these inlaid dovetails and it's really not that hard. You cut two sets of tails, connect them together, trim your board about an eighth of an inch, and then cut another set of pins and tails. There's a lot of repetitive steps, so there's some areas I'm going to breeze through, but I have a lot of tips and tricks in here. If you're an experienced dovetailer, you can skip ahead. I get into the inlay part about halfway through the video. If you're new to dovetails, watch this video all the way through. It's going to give you a lot of great tips and tricks. One thing to know is that we're going to be using the Katzmoses Magnetic Dovetail Jig version 2.0. I came out with this a couple of weeks ago. It's patent pending. Originally, the jig had a tail side that was angled down, but I mounted the post on the other side of the jig, and so now you don't need another board as support when you get to your end tails. It also has a shoulder side, a pin side, and works great as a chisel guide on all sides. For every step of the process, this thing will help you cut perfect dovetails. So let me show you how we do it. We're going to be using maple as our inlay and then walnut sides today. Okay, the first step is to lay out the depth of our pins and tails. I've set my marking gauge to the depth of our board, and since we're doing inlay dovetails, it's important you still do the depth of your board, which is a little counterintuitive, but as you can see here, the distance here that you leave your inlay is going to be the same distance away that your board sits above the bottom of the inlay, and so you want to stick with the same depth because if you go deeper, you're going to end up getting some funky, odd-looking keys like that. So what you do, start by setting your depth on your main lumber, so not the piece that is the inlay, so the one that is the majority of the wood. You're going to want to mark your shoulder, and then do the same thing with the piece you're doing the inlay. Now we're going to lay out our tails. All right, this is a super easy way to mark out your tails. So I start from one side of the board, and just walk this across, making little holes, and here at the end, that's your half pin, and then you start from this edge of the board, making holes and walking your way across, and then there's your other half pin. Then I take my marking knife, along with my square, put it right in that indentation we made with our divider, slide my square up to it, and mark out our tails. If you're not using a jig, now is the time you'd want to mark the sides of your tails, and you mark from the line you just made down to your scribe line by putting your marking gauge right in your line, sliding it over, and then just going down to your scribe line. One of the things that makes these look really good is the smaller it is, the cooler these things look, and so now I mark out my waist, so I don't make any mistakes, and because we're using this jig, I don't need to mark out the side lines here, because it's going to keep it at the perfect angle. Now we just get right to cutting. So because this is a pull saw, and it cuts on the pull stroke, what I do is I take it, put it right in my knife line, and I push slightly forward, which creates a little teeny indentation, and then I'm going to take my magnetic jig, slide it up to it, stick it right there, and then we just cut down to our scribe line. Now we're going to cut off our shoulders, and what's really cool about this jig is it also does shoulders, so same thing, just mark your place, and then you're going to take your shoulder side over here, slide it up, now we're going to clear out our waist with our coping saw, and then just flip the board around. Now we're going to clear out our waist with our chisel here. You want to get as close to your line as you can before you actually chop into your line. That'll keep our chisel from pushing backwards on the bevel, and what happens with a chisel, because of the bevel in it, when you push down, what happens is it gets pushed back into your work piece, so the more material you remove, the cleaner your line's going to be, and then when you get down to there, you put it right in your knife line, hold your chisel at 90 degrees, and just chop about a third of the way through, or halfway, roughly. You want to stay slightly away from your corners to avoid bruising them. You just flip it over, clear out as much waste as you can. Now we're going to clean up the insides of our corners here. You can use a skew chisel, or just very carefully get in there with a smaller chisel. Very nice set of dovetails here, very clean. And now this next step is a crucial step in the inlay process. You really want to take your time with this step and get it right. I take my other board, set it down, just like this. So we're going to lay it on top, line up the tops of our tails that we just cut with the scribe line, make sure the boards are lined up, and then I lock that down there. I'll also attach this board to my bench, take a marking gauge, and just mark down to your scribe line. The next step is to take your marking gauge, place it right at the very top of that scribe line, slide your square over, and then mark out the tops of those tails. One of the reasons that you put your marking knife in your line first and then slide your square over is then you know you're going to be exactly in the same spot. And then we mark out our waist. And just like before, we're going to cut down, and you want to be as close to your line as possible while remaining in the waist side. Really cool trick for getting tight dovetails. I'm going to darken up this scribe line for you so you can see it. But your saw, just like your table saw, has teeth, and they have a set to them. They stick slightly out on both sides. And so when you're lining up your scribe line, you really want to just put the correct side of your teeth right in that line. You don't want to just stick your saw in the line and figure it out because that may put you off just a fraction. And so what I do is I line up the right side set with my scribe line and go the opposite way that my saw cuts. And that creates just a little bit of a groove to get you started. And then you just perfectly get right in that line. Now we're going to remove our waist just like we did before by starting in our kerf but facing away from the piece we want to keep. Got down there pretty close to our scribe line. Now we'll chisel that out. Now, another cool thing about this jig is you can use it as a 90 degree guide on your chisel. So you can place it in your knife line, and then you know that that's 90. About halfway through shooting this video, I actually changed the design of the jig so the post is mounted on the other side. This makes it so that you can use it as a chisel guide but on top of your work piece, which is a lot easier. I'll go over that a little bit later in the video. And there we go. So we're going to glue this up, let it dry, and then we're going to trim it just an eighth of an inch above and then do this whole process again, but we're going to cut just tails one time and then pins. All right, we've got everything we need for our glue up. We've got a mallet for whacking it together, some plastic, some clamps, some cauls, some clamps for those cauls so we keep everything nice and level and flat and even, a wet rag, a brush, and some sawdust. And you can check out the video I did about fixing gaps in dovetails. These don't appear to have any gaps but I always feel it's better safe than sorry. So I'll put a little sawdust in there and if it all sands away, it sands away. If it fills in a teeny little gap I didn't see, great. As you can see, that is a very gap-free dovetail. But to be safe, we're going to take a little sawdust. I have some walnut sawdust here from resawing on the bandsaw. And just rub it in there. And this will ensure that there's not a single gap and it's going to sand off of all this. Same thing here, we'll just make sure we have good glue coverage. Shove that down in there. So do your edges as well. We'll just tighten that up. You don't have to go too tight on this, just enough so that you get a little bit of squeeze out. And there we go. And you can see we're getting a little squeeze out, that's a good sign. Then we're going to let that dry. Okay, we're going to go ahead and remove our clamps. We've removed our clamps. We're going to go ahead and clean this up. I'm going to sand it. We're going to rejoin our edges to make sure everything is in line. And then we're going to cut our inlay. And then we're going to go ahead and join the edges. All right. So now you can see we have a perfect set of tails in tails. So now we're going to cut our inlay off, leaving an eighth of an inch. And what that's going to do is bring our tails up an eighth of an inch here. And then we'll lay out our line so that we're an eighth of an inch in. And that'll give us an eighth inch inlay all the way around. Okay, now we're going to go ahead and cut off our inlay an eighth of an inch above. And this is what we're left with. Okay, now we need to re-mark our depth with our marking gauge. And again, you want to make sure that the depth is the same width as your boards. Mark our shoulders on our inlay board. As you can see, our line is exactly the same distance as it is on the top of the tails up here. And that's going to be important for it looking uniform and giving it that 3D look. I've marked out an eighth of an inch in pencil here from the very corner of my tail. And then what I'm going to use is a dovetail marker. You could also use an angle finder. I'm going to take my dovetail marker and put my marking gauge right on that pencil line. Slide my dovetail marker over and then mark from the top down. And that'll allow you to put your marking knife right up in that mark and slide your square over and then make a mark. And then when we cut, we're going to want to stay to the inside of that line to make sure we maintain our eighth of an inch all the way around. So I'm going to go ahead and lay these out. Now we're going to go ahead and cut out our tails. And we need to be very diligent about staying on the correct side of our line. So we want to make sure that we only cut on the waist side of our line. We take our saw, which has set teeth, as I talked about before, and we put those teeth right on the right side of the line. Using your finger, I push my saw the opposite way that it cuts to make just a little groove. And then I take my dovetail jig and slide it up to the saw. We're going to cut down right to... We're now on the third set of tails we've cut in this video. So I'm going to breeze through this section, but I have added a second camera angle so you can get a better idea of what's going on. This is also the point where I've changed the design of the jig. Please let me know what you think about the second camera angle in the comment section. And here we are cutting our shoulders, lining our saw up, sliding the jig to it. The jig ensures that you're a perfect 90 degrees. But what I like to do is go really slow at the end and just put a little pressure and pop that last piece out so I don't cut into my half tail. When clearing waste with your coping saw, you want to get as close to the line as possible without going over it. Again, we're using the jig as a 90 degree chisel guide. This ensures you get a clean line and that you don't get tear out on your other side or a hump in the middle. You can see using the jig as a chisel guide works really, really well. So now we're going to clean up our corners. So I'm going to show you how to use this as a chisel guide. So you take your chisel, put it right into your knife line and just pare down. So here you can see we have very clean, even inlay here. And now all we need to do is cut our pins. Now we're going to go ahead and mark out our pins. And I use my plane. We're going to go ahead and label our waste. We're going to go ahead and cut out our pins and we're going to make sure we cut on the waste side of our line. So again, using your finger. And again, just like we did for our tails, we're going to cut down to our scribe line. This jig makes it really easy because of the post, which matches the angle of the angled tail side. This ensures that your cuts on both your pins and tail side match up perfectly. Now we're going to chisel out the waste here. I like to start on my thin side. So that way, when I go through, I'm not worried about hitting the other sides of the pins. Now we're going to clean up these corners. Now we're going to do a test fit here, see where we're off. Okay, so the only one we need to take down is this one a little bit. I'm going to show you how you can use the pin side as a chisel guide. So you just take a chisel. Now, it just so happens we need to clean a sliver off of this shoulder. And so you can use the shoulder side of your jig. Got a very tight fit going on here. I'm not going to slam it too far home, but let's put some glue on this. And just like before, we're going to add that really fine resaw sawdust to make sure that if there are any gaps, they'll be covered up and impossible to see. So now we're going to go ahead and let that dry and come back, sand it up, throw some spray lacquer on it so you can see what it looks like. Glue's dry, we got to take off our clamps here. All right, so we've got this sanded up. I'm going to put a little spray lacquer on it so you can see what it looks like. There's the final product, inlaid dovetails. Thank you so much for watching. Check out my Instagram at jcatsmoses. My Facebook, which is facebook.com front slash catsmoseswoodworking. Please subscribe to my channel. Please comment, like, and share this video. I love the comments. I really enjoy reading your comments. I try and respond to every single one. Check out these two videos if you want to see more about the Catsmoses Dovetail Jig. It's really great. I just came out with a version 2.0, which you see used in the second half of this video. And thank you so much for watching. Have a wonderful day.