The length of these pieces determines how much support of the workpiece you have on either side of the blade. -----⁠ The workpiece will rest on this strip, when making the cuts. Copyright text 2019 by The Renaissance Woodworker. With a small combination square, I can transfer the lines to the front, since the end-grain is not visible when aligning for the cut. I used the table saw to cut the dovetail profile on the batten. Using a 12″ wide board makes for plenty of registration against the fence, but you must make sure that this board is flat or risk ending up with a similar problem that I had with the groove. I also mark my waste. Sliding Table Saws Table Saws Cabinet Table Saws In Stock 10" 5 HP Sliding Table Saw (G0623X) 29 $ 3,395. Working with a soft wood like Pine means that you don’t want to spend too much time dry fitting a joint like this or it won’t be so tight anymore. Here are the two 13-1/2″-wide white oak boards I’m using for the top of the staked worktable. With sliding dovetails you want the fit a little looser or you will kill yourself trying to get them seated properly especially once the glue has swollen the joint. After the height of the cut is set up I can position my board for the first cut. I was shooting for the batten to go home easily, save the last few inches, where I will apply glue before I bring the joint home with a mallet. The stop needs to be square to the base of the jig. 62 and finished up with a smoothing pass with the smoother. I have a hammer combo machine so this is very usefull to me. So the battens are fit; tomorrow I’ll install the legs, surface the top and finish up the piece. This leaves almost no waste in between the tails. Hey Brendan, why didn’t you use a tapered sliding dovetail? After today’s experience, I can say that this is an accurate and handy way to execute this joint in your shop. The stop block ensures perfect repeatability of the cuts on multiple boards. However, this does not impact our recommendations. If you do have a board that isn’t exactly flat you can either make sure it is flat or route the groove using a hand held router that will track the curves like a shorter hand plane would. My groove runs 14.5″ up from the bottom of the side so using the table saw fence makes this job easy. You can give your consent to whole categories or display further information and select certain cookies. Now I want to hit my scribe line dead on. My groove runs 14.5″ up from the bottom of the side so using the table saw fence makes this job easy. Here are some supplies and tools we find essential in our everyday work around the shop. As the last step, I nibble away the remaining waste with a series of cuts. In his book, Chris shows a great way to put in the long joint by hand using a large tenon saw, a chisel and a router plane. Alright, the jig is almost finished. Some of them are essential, while others help us to improve this website and your experience. As I followed your preparation of the dovetail slots and the battens, I was expecting you to drill the angled holes for the legs. There are 2″ between the router base’s flat side and the bit’s centerpoint, and I’m using a 1/2″ straight bit – so I drew two parallel lines 9″ apart, which left me with a roughly 5-1/2″ sliding dovetail. I start by ripping 15mm (½”) birch plywood to a 20cm (8”) strip and two 5cm (2”) strips. This could have been done the same way Chris does in his book, with a chisel and router plane (which I may prefer, as the mess and noise are significantly diminished), but I wanted to try it out with power tools. https://www.popularwoodworking.com/wp-content/uploads/popwood_logos-01.png, https://www.popularwoodworking.com/wp-content/uploads/battenIn625-113x113.jpg, Shaker Storage & Shelving Shop Resources Collection, © 2020 Cruz Bay Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved, Like Your Woodworking Teacher? In the end, I’m pretty firmly in the hybrid woodworking camp. With two holes for M6 star knobs, you can mount it to the t-track. How really depends on your particular miter gauge. I am aiming for a fit that I can press into place without a mallet but one that is very tight right at the front to seal up any gaps on that show face. The inserts don’t have to fit gap-free or whatsoever. – Simple Woodworking Projects, Christopher Schwarz’s “Anarchist Design Book. Last week, I built a new coffee table for our place. Looking god so far. The bed wa, Assembling the bed⁠ With a standard blade, I want the teeth to almost touch the line at the highest point. He's a woodworker, designer and tree nerd from the northeastern United States. I like to share my passion for woodworking and building stuff with you. I ofte, Here it is in all its beauty⁠ I flip the board face-to-face to make the cut on the other side. So what good are some pretty French feet without a case to sit upon them? Get on the fast track to the woodworking content you really like by joining my list and telling me what you most want to see in video, text, song, poetry, and performance art. (You can also use your sliding bevel set at the desired angle for this step). With a thin-kerf blade you can go super narrow. Awesome I hope you’ll like it! The angle for the tails is achieved by tilting the blade and the angle for the pins by adjusting the miter gauge. Then I set the sliding bevel to the exact angle of the dovetails. Before starting the feet I had routed the sliding dovetail pin groove. My battens are roughly 5-1/2″ wide, but this is just an estimate – in practice, the battens’ width will be dictated by the slots, so I’m going cut the slots, then fit the battens to them. -----⁠ What do you think? Also important to note: Routing across the grain can occasionally lead to blowout when the bit exits the work. My first thought was that the router table wasn’t flat and maybe the top had sagged. My process is a bit different – I opted to go the power-tool route, though I took a few notes from Chris and incorporated some of the sensitivities of handwork to sweeten the fit and precision. This works great for case work because you can set the fence far away from the bit to make grooves in the center of a side like in this case. But it still needs a stop-block to make the cuts repeatable. Imprint. The dovetail slot is 5/8″ deep and 5-1/4″ wide. It also makes it possible to cut different dovetail angles with the same jig. Content from video platforms and social media platforms is blocked by default. Brendan Bernhardt Gaffney is the former managing editor of Popular Woodworking. Determine their width, using your best judgment, based on the... Know the angle of your bit. In the next few months, I’ve got a lot of furniture to make; Josselyn (my partner) and I just moved to Cincinnati from Maine. P.S. So first you need to run the dovetail grooves. The pin is cut exactly the same as a dado with a saw to create the sides, a chisel to roughly remove the waste, then … Error: API requests are being delayed for this account. The floating key s, Putting on a finish⁠ Chisel and sharpening for Kumiko⁠ I just made sure to have a solid footing for the base and tried not to be too aggressive. It doesn’t work and you end up with a cut in the wrong direction. So I set the shelf a little more than halfway in to make sure I have a good fit that will still work once glue is has swollen the joint and I stop there. If External Media cookies are accepted, access to those contents no longer requires manual consent. Angles range from 7° to 14°. I like this arrangement because I can use the table saw fence from time to time as a fence for the router. For my sliding table saw I had to drill two holes to accept the pins of the gauge and place two threaded inserts for the M6 star knobs. So I started on my test piece sneaking up on the fit when I realized that my tail was about 1/8″ longer than the pin groove and I would have a gap at the shoulder. I always take a piece of scrap and sneak up on the fit making minuscule adjustments until I have a sound fit. I cut the pins of the sliding dovetail first and really this is less a dovetail joint and more of a dado or housed joint. I had already started the casework before the feet but took a detour from it to build the feet because my set up for the sliding dovetail that secures the center shelf was being fussy. An alumnus of The Krenov School (formerly College of the Redwoods) his focus in woodworking is on the intersections of good design, fine wood and practiced technique. Cookie by Google used for website analytics. Your email address will not be published. I got there pretty quickly, and establishing the correct bevel with the table saw made this even easier. The front legs were a bit t, Bowtie Inlay⁠ ----⁠ The slots are finished, so it’s time to fit the battens. With a dovetail marker and a pencil I layout the tails and mark the pins as waste. So here is my case, dry fit and clamped. Let me know in the comments below! Then I cut the t-track to length, countersink, pre-drill and screw it in place.