Hand-cut Dovetails on Compound-Angles

Before dovetailing the drawers for Angle Madness, I wanted to work through a procedure to easily "calculate" the compound angles I'd need for the drawers.  I say "calculate" in quotes because I wanted a procedure based exclusively on the use of bevel gauges reading angles in-situ.  This will be useful if you don't have your slide-rule handy...

For the drawers, I need two types of angles: the rear has inclined tail boards with a vertical pin board. The front of the drawers has both inclined tail and pin boards.  Ultimately, they are the same thing since a "vertical" board still has an angle, but there are some shortcuts we can take when only one board is inclined.  Things get only marginally more complicated for a joint with both boards inclined.  Seriously! Only marginally more complicated.

Even if you never plan on doing compound-angle dovetails, the portion of the procedure used to determine the projection of the boards on each other would be useful to make a simple butt joint between angled parts.  But don't stop at the butt; the dovetail is easy!

This episode repeats the procedure 4 times for the different joints. Hopefully that reinforces the procedure without being a snoozer.



Two years ago (already?!) I did a short series of videos on hand-cut dovetails. I'm the first to admit I'm not a great dovetailer, but the methods are there for the ho-hum pins-first/tails-first decision, but also for houndstooth dovetails, mitered dovetails, and others.  This blog entry is the first for the series; the table of contents at the top will show you the others.  Uhg, it was 104ºF in the shop during those videos. There's a reason for wearing all black!!

The next episode of Angle Madness is also partly recorded so I hope to not disappear for a month again :)

Refreshing a Guiderail Splinterguard and Dimple Marking Technique

A bit of a quickie video. I'm working on Angle Madness again and needing to cut the panels for the tapered octagonal drawer boxes. For that, I really need the splinterguard on the MFT to be dead accurate. It always has been, for years, until I needed to quickly cut something on the MFT during the Tim Burton Table build while I had the Panther blade in the TS-75. Unlike the TS-55 blades that all have the same kerf width, TS-75 blades sometimes differ.  Now, my splinterguard is about 0.5mm off.

The first part of the video, though, covers something I often do anyway with the saw: dimple marking (my own silly term :)  With the saw on the rail, it's easy to use the ATB blade to mark exactly where the cut will be. Great for verifying and occasional adjustments. For 12 panels, I want the splinterguard accurate...

Second half of the video shows how to bump the splinterguard over so you can recut it accurately. Seems easy enough, but it comes up on forums all the time. Usually people are trying to peel it off and reuse the aged adhesive. I'll show you a better way that works quickly and has no peel-off problems.

After posting this, some people asked about the turners' tape mentioned in the video. It is essentially a double-stick tape. A good one is this one from Lee Valley.  The one I used in the video is from InterTapePolymer.com, but I can't find the woodworking store that sells it now.

I used a different brand that I have handy. Many woodworking catalogs will call this type of double stick tape "turners' tape" since, I guess, turners use it (I don't turn yet!)

Technique - Matching Existing Compound Angles

When stacking up compound cuts to make an octagonal cylinder or other multi-faceted object, the minor error in each cut also compounds making the last piece fit less than well.

A better method I used for the tapered octagonal column ("tapered octagon" for short!) was to glue up the first seven facets then measure the exact part I needed for the eighth.  Matching the miter angles of the part is easy, but usually there's confusion on how to measure the associated bevel angles.  This short video (no, really! under 7 minutes!) shows how I did the measurement.

I'll also discuss an animation at the end that shows a bit of how the bevel angle relates to the included angle and stock thickness.

No math is used or harmed in this video; safe for all ages :)

(Here's a link to the YouTube page for my email subscribers; sorry I've been forgetting that lately: Technique - Matching Existing Compound Angles)

Over the weekend, I renumbered all the videos (and renamed my local copies to match).  Generally, a new video gets the next number, but videos that are in a series get point numbers.  For example, #82 is the No Comment #2 series so each video is #82.1, #82.2, #82.3 etc to better know the order of the videos.  A viewer on YouTube suggested numbering them all since he found one mid-series by chance and didn't have an easy way to see where he was at. Hopefully this helps, although I understand it can look confusing on, say, the Sculpted Mahogany Vanity build where the last video was #38.12 released after one of the Domino crib-sheet videos #56.  I'm thinking the order in a series is more important than strict chronological order over all of them.  Might be wrong; do that often :)