Learning a New Skill

 

The next time I got some time to spend in my shop, I spent an hour on the table saw making the sides of the boards nice and straight and the ends squared off. Not shown, but I also final cut them to the exact sizes I would be needing for the various boxes I was going to be building.

In my first post on this project last week, I mentioned that I wanted to learn a new skill that might serve me later on future projects. There are dozens of ways I could fasten those boards together to form rectangular boxes but I settled on using dovetails. For those who don't know, dovetails are a traditional joint used back before we had the modern adhesives and glues that I have access to today. The design of the joint itself provided the necessary support to keep things together. I have a jig that makes nice dovetails and I have used it in the past when I was making lots of them such as all the drawers in my office desk. While definitely functional, they look exactly like what they are, a joint made using power tools and jigs. I would like to learn how to make such joints by hand. While slower when doing a lot of joints, it is probably faster to do them by hand than to set up the jig and get it dialed in on dozens of pieces of scrap before I run a project piece through it. I also have the benefit of designing a joint that is not perfectly regular and can instead look one of a kind and even artistic. 

Above gives you sort of an idea of what I am talking about. Instead of regularly spaced dovetails, I can make wide "tails" and the other board will have narrow "pins" that when mated together using modern adhesives, will be an extremely strong joint and yet look handmade and like something you would never be able to purchase in a store. 

To to the work, I needed some of the tools seen above. Not shown are a set of sharp chisels and a mallet. Using those tools, I turned the above into what you see below, a completed set of tails on the board that will form one vertical side of my tool cabinet. I'm not expecting perfection on creating this joint seeing that this is my first time doing it by hand, but I hope to learn from my probably mistakes so that when the time comes to do it on a piece of fine furniture for the house, I can get great results. To do that, I need practice and I need to create tails on the other end of this board and five more boards that will form the vertical sides of all the various pieces.