Using a Commercial Dovetail Jig for Half-Blind Dovetails

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Dovetails have long been associated with quality woodworking and quality furniture. Dovetails look great and add a unique detail that shows the craftsmanship of the woodworker. Traditionally, dovetails were cut by hand using a back saw and a chisel, and in some cases a coping saw top help cut out the unused pieces. If you are a dedicated hand tool craftsman and or are a commercial woodworker and you can take the time to practice hand cutting dovetails, it is possible to get some amazingly accurate and beautiful results. If you are a some-times, novice or infrequent woodworker, cutting hand dovetails is something you may do very seldom so getting nice cut dovetails is much harder to do, and that is why a number of companies have developed and sell, jigs that can help those "infrequent" woodworkers in making quality dovetails.

Many of the commercial dovetail jigs are similar in their designs and in the way they operate. In most cases they will use a router with a dovetail bit fitted to it, and often these bits are included with the jig. Another thing in common with most of the commercial jigs is that they will only make what are called 1/2 blind dovetails out of the box, if you want to make Through dovetails you may need to purchase additional pieces for your jig. To see pictures of the difference between Through and 1/2 blind dovetails, see pictures further in the article.

Finding Figured Woods

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Woodworkers are always looking for wood that has "figure" or some other anomaly that makes it distinctive. Figured wood is relatively hard to find, as is most wood with some sort of distinction. When it comes to wood that look different there are a few different things to look for and it depends on what you want to do with the wood when you are looking. Wood turners are very often making smaller pieces like bowls, urns, pens and other smaller projects so finding distinctive wood for a turner is very important. Luthiers are probably the highest on the level of looking for distinctive woods because they are always looking for some sort of figured wood for making musical instruments. Wood artists who make smaller projects are also often looking for wood that is different so there is a big call for these kinds of woods.

Very often it is possible to find some of these woods, particularly if you don't need a large volume of it, in something a close as a wood pile. When trees are cut down for firewood, from time to time there are parts of the the tree that are hard to cut with a chain saw, or hard to split with an axe. These pieces or often cast aside, and these are often the pieces that can provide some sort of figure, unique grain structure or even spalting.

Distinctive woods come in a variety of ways, they can be something a simple as "crotch wood", a term used to describe the way wood grows around the joint of a branch and where it joins the main part of a tree, to something more elaborate as a spalting, which happens when wood gets wet for long periods and fungus grows throughout the wood changing the color patterning within the wood.

Box Joint Jig - Operational Details

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Judging by the number of questions I received about making the box joint jig, it is evident that I didn't cover off with enough detail exactly now the "indexing" or "finger alignment" worked, so this video is to make up that shortfall. When you are making Lynn Sabin box joint jig, one of the key components is the Readi-Rod (also known as threaded rod, Redi Rod, Ready Rod and Thready Rod). The rod basically has three components, the length of the rod, the diameter of the rod and the number of threads per inch that are  carved into the rod. Of Course the length is important as it needs to be the full length of your jig, the diameter is not so important but I found 3/8" to be a good weight to work with, and the final Very important component, the threads per inch ... should be 16 threads per inch. There are many other options of threads per inch and you can decide if another is best for you, but for most woodworkers 16 will be the best and here's how it works. 

Making and iPad or Tablet Stand

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Trying to integrate technology into a woodworking shop can be a bit of a challenge, depending on the tool. It's pretty easy to purchase cordless drills, grinders, sanders etc. but what about bringing technical information into the workshop in the form of a Tablet or iPad?  To start off with, the tablet needs to have a place to stand, because you can's always be picking it up and holding it, and often your hands may be dusty or dirty, which you also don't want to transfer to an electronic device, so the first step was to get a stand for my tablet. I had looked at the dozens and dozens of tablet and iPad stands, but found nothing that really inspired me, yeah, they all worked but ... hey, this is a workshop and here we try to make nice looking, functional things out of wood - not plastic.

I decided a simple "sandwich board" type design would work well, would be easy to make and would look good. The first step in the simple design was deciding on what angle would work best for both sitting and standing, and I determined that 30 degrees was near perfect for both.

Since I wanted the stand to be quite rigid, I decided that making box joints along the top edge would not only look great, but once glued, would hold the stand together extremely well and last for a long, long time. Next I had to determine what wood that would look nice, yet would hold up well which means it is probably best being a hardwood, and what thickness would it be. Then I needed to .....