Monthly Archives: February 2012
Wood…
One of the reasons I got into woodworking originally was the beauty of the material itself. I remember making simple things in shop in 7th grade and being completely blown away by the wood after it had been sanded, stained and shellacked. Today was a frustrating day at work, so I stopped on my way home [...]
Dovetails – Actually Using Them!
I started making a chest to keep my saws in, and it’s turned out to be great practice making dovetails. These are far from perfect, but three of the joints fit together with almost no paring to get the fit nice. The fourth, well apparently it shifted slightly when I was marking out the pins [...]
Dovetails – Chopping and Paring
I’ve been practicing my sawing, and I’m (finally) getting more comfortable with keeping the cut square to the face of the board on the tails, which is encouraging. As you can imagine, it’s just practice. Since I had used up the last of my cheesy pine scraps on practicing sawing, I picked up two 1 [...]
Dovetails – Layout
Laying out dovetails is probably the simplest part, but there are a few tricks that help. I’m doing tails first. Apparently there are two camps, the pins-first folks and the tails-first folks. I’m just trying to get a handle on dovetailing, and this is what is (sorta) working for me. To do the layout you [...]
Dovetails – Sawing
Two weeks ago I attended a Hand Cut Dovetails class at the Port Townsend School of Woodworking. I’ve wanted to write about what I learned ever since, but life has conspired to delay that. A visit from my parents, my son’s chorus concert at school (he was very cute) and a dozen other things — [...]
Dovetail Class Report
I spent the weekend in Port Townsend for a dovetail class. It was a lot of fun, and really helpful to have someone look over my shoulder and point out what I’m doing wrong. Jim Tolpin taught the first morning, and Tim Lawson taught the rest of the weekend. The school is well equipped with hand tools [...]
Making a Marking Gauge, Part 2
A while back I started making a marking gauge. I set it aside for a while – in part I’ve been working on my bench, but also because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do for the cutter on this gauge. I’ve seen folks use a pointed piece of drill rod, but that doesn’t [...]
