Easy Hand Cut Dovetails With A Magnetic Guide

The joinery is going to be uh hand cut dovetails. And it's easy for me to screw this up as far as which are the pins, which are the tails as far as cutting them on the appropriate board. So I marked on the top surfaces, which will also designate the top surface of each one of these boards. Uh joint number one, joint number two, three, and four. And then on each front face of the boards, I wrote a T for tails, P for pins. Uh, typically you wouldn't have to do that if you know that the long pieces are going to have tails on both sides. The short pieces are going to have pins on both sides. But going ahead and doing that also lets me know the outside face of each one of these joints. Because all of these dovetails will be through dovetails, I'm setting my marking gauge to the same distance as the thickness of the material. And each one of the pin boards will get marks on the ends of the long faces only. And each one of the tail boards will get marks on both the long faces and the short faces. I'm leaning over my camera, so hopefully I don't screw this up. I'm just going to try and show you the best I can. This line on either side over here represents a half pin. I'm cutting these joints tails first. So I need to mark out the tails on the end of my tailboard. Half pin, half pin. And I used my dividers, which is nothing more than just a drafting compass that I removed the lead and added another nail in. But I used these to set an equal spacing on both sides, made a little point, struck a nice little line, and that's my half pin. Now I want to mark out the tails on the inside. And I want them to be symmetrical. So I am using this set of dividers. Now, the distance from one point to the other point on these dividers equals one full tail plus one full pin. So, uh I want three tails. So, let's gently without leaving any indentations in the wood, let's walk this off. One, two, and three. And what I want to end up over here is I want to be off into space over here. And I want to have the distance from where I end up to this point to be about twice the distance of this edge to this point because this is a half pin and I want a full pin. So, as you can see, I'm not quite here yet. So, I will increase the distance. Not by much because it's going to be multiplied by three for the three tails. So, one, two, and three. I'm not quite there yet. So, I'll increase a little bit more. And once you have this set, you can mark all of your uh joints really fast. So right there, I'm about twice the distance to this point as this edge is to this point. So that's going to be a full pin. This is a half pin. Now what I can do is actually make marks. So one tail and pin, two tails and pins, and that's it from this side. So, I'm going to start over here and go the opposite direction. One tail and pin and one tail and pin. So, that gave me four points in the middle. I can put my pencil into the point and strike some lines. Now I have evenly spaced tails one, two, and three. and evenly sized pins. Full pin, full pin. Half of that distance equals a half pin and a half pin. Everything is nice and symmetrical. And now that I have this set, I can go ahead and mark all of my other joints as well. I've got two dovetail saws to uh choose from to make these cuts. Now, this saw for me is very fast. Uh but I am not efficient with this. I can make some really nice joints, but not consistently. So, for me, I want this to look nice. I'm going to use a magnetic guide and a thin Japanese pole saw. So, the magnetic guide just sticks onto the saw and it will guide the saw at the appropriate angle through the cuts. So, for me, I don't have to go through the step of marking these these these angled lines. But if you're using one of these saws, it's a good idea to make the lines. That way, you have something to follow. Now, something else that I did is use a pencil to mark my cutting gauge line because I have a hard time seeing and that will make me uh identify this line a lot easier without sawing through it on the outside face. It's okay to saw through it just a little bit on the inside because it's going to be covered up. No one will ever see it. But on the outside face, which is where I put my uh T for tails, I don't want to go past this line with the saw. Now all I have to worry about is moving the guide left to right into the appropriate position to make the appropriate angled cuts in the appropriate spot. [Music] [Laughter] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] [Applause] Now on the tailboard, we need to remove all of the pins. The pins are the waste. And you can chisel this away. I like to use a cheap coping saw. This is a $10 coping saw. and just remove all of the material as much as I can with the coping saw before I break out the chisels. Now, I don't put the coping saw in this the saw curves that I've already made because I have a tendency to just screw up my uh this the sides of my tails. So, it just takes a second longer to cut another curve right down the middle of the pin and then saw left or right to remove as much waste as I can. The half pins on the side can be removed with a dovetail saw, making sure to stay as close as possible to the line. And if you're accurate and stay on the line with your cut, you don't even have to use any chisels to clean this up later. Now, as you can see, I did not do that great of a job removing the bulk of the material with a coping saw, but that's okay cuz the rest can be chiseled out. Now, I've already done the other side of the joint. Now, I'm going to finish it over here. So, you want to chisel about halfway through the thickness of the material and then work from the other side, which is what I'm doing right now. And because I have so much here, it I don't want to start at the knife line and then just plow through all this because typically when you have more material on the waist side of the knife line, it's going to push the chisel a little bit into your workpiece and you don't want that to happen because anything on this side of the knife line is going to be shown with a little gap. if this chisel moves once the joint is completed. So, I'll remove the bulk of this material really quick with a couple uh couple passes with the chisel and then I will work from my knife line to make this nice and neat Any remaining crap that may be in the way can be removed with a chisel. And I don't want to push all the way through because then I could end up breaking out the other side. So I'm only working the first half from my side. And then I can flip the board around and get this side. Once all the junk is out of the way, then the the tailboard is pretty much done. With all of my tails done, I can start in on the pins. And I made sure to get the same number joint here. This is joint number three on both the tails and the pins piece. And then I also have both outside faces facing up. Now, these need to be marked like so. And there's a couple different ways to hold the material in the vice the way that you need it. And I've got a little jig here that will allow me to to hold this piece perfectly vertical and allow me to slide uh the tail piece against this stop so that it is perpendicular right over the pin board. And now I can transfer my my tails to the pin board with a marking knife. Now, these probably aren't showing up that well on the video, but I can see these just fine. And just to make sure that I don't screw up, I'm going to put some marks or some pencil in the waist area. I'm cutting out the area that will be uh that was the the tails on the this board. That'll leave me all the pins. To make my pin cuts, I'm going to use the same magnetic guide, but I'm going to rotate it so that the angle is no longer no longer in the up and down direction, but the angle is in the front to back direction. This will make the saw blade uh cut vertically, but on an angle that will match the pins. Now, this particular blade is very thin, but it does have some thickness to it. So I want to make sure that the entire blade is on the waist side of the cut and not in the pins itself. So in this case, this first tail needs to be removed. And I want to leave this pin. So I'll position the saw so that the outside face right here, only that face will touch my marking gauge line. And then I can make the first three cuts. And I say three in this instance because I'm right-handed and I only want to use the right side of the jig. So I can make one cut, two, three with this particular uh setup. And then I will rotate both the jig or the magnetic guide and the board 180°. And then I can still use uh my right hand uh saw on the right side of the jig to cut the other three cuts. [Music] Just like the tails, I'll use the coping saw to remove the majority of the waste and then chisel down to the line. [Applause] I haven't even cleaned up my inside corners of these pins. Really quick, I just want to test this joint. And if so long as I followed the the lines appropriately and cut on the appropriate side of the joint, this should fit together very easily. So, I haven't trimmed up the inside corner, so I'm not going to drive it all the way home. But everything is lining up just fine. And um I can't get that type of consistency with a uh a traditional western style uh dovetail saw. This little guy, like I said, it's not sponsored video or anything, but uh one of these little magnetic guides, very awesome. You get very consistent results so long as you uh saw on the appropriate side of your marking lines. So, this is going to go together very nice. There's not not any gaps at all and there shouldn't be any whatsoever once I uh clean clean up these inside corners of the pins and drive this home. So, that's one joint done or one set of pins done, I should say. I've got all the tails cut. I'm going to go ahead and cut the rest of these pins really quick. Heat. Heat. [Applause] [Music] After gluing up a dovetail joint on all my other test pieces, I normally smear a bunch of sawdust on the outside of the joint to hopefully push a little bit of sawdust inside any of the cracks that may be there and make everything look all nice and neat. I think I'm not going to do the sawdust method on this glue up. Uh just cuz I'm kind of curious to see how well these joints actually did turn out. [Applause]