Half blind dovetail advice
Welcome! / Forums / General Woodworking Discussions / Woodworking Methods and Techniques / Half blind dovetail advice
Tagged: repair, roof, solve problem
- This topic has 8 replies, 7 voices, and was last updated 1 week ago by roofing chatter.
-
AuthorPosts
-
30 August 2023 at 1:01 pm #811712
Apologies if this posts twice. Submitted similar a few days back but didn’t work for some reason.
Hi all
Long time follower of Paul but first post. After a while from the bench made a drawer for a saw till. Cut half blind dovetails on the front using the rebate method for alignment. On assembly had an approx 1mm gap both at the rebate line and between tail and half blind (see pictures). I’ve checked the baselines are all square and cleared out and I’m sure the rebate was tight when marked…
Any thoughts as to what has caused this gap? Thanks for reading.
Tom
Attachments:
You must be logged in to view attached files.Hi Tom
Looks like you did shift things around while marking or you cut the half blinds on the outside of the line… Does your dovetail saw leave approximately that size of a kerf?
I’d guess you plane the rebate on the tail board and cut tails first, so it could very well be marking error (marking knife has 2 bevels like the Stanley Paul uses?)
Just my guessing…
Looks like my first attempt where I had cut out the wrong side of the marked lines….
Diego31 August 2023 at 4:46 pm #811848Hi Tom,
Just a few thoughts based on that I’ve not always been succesful using a combination square.
If the bottoms of the pin recesses are square to the faces of the drawer sides and the bottoms of the tail recesses are of constant depth (para-planar to the drawer front), then – as both gap lines are of equal width – there should be a close fit.
With all due apologies, could it be that the width of the rebate on the inside of the tail piece is one mm less than the depth of the cut line?
Another of my culprits behind this situation has been failure at completely clean out the corners between the ends and bottoms of the pin recesses. Checking with my ordinary sliding square didn’t quite reveal the problem, but a wheel gauge set to the depth would grab as it caught non flat parts of the recesses.
Finally, and this is really silly: if the sides aren’t square to the front, then there will be a gap.
31 August 2023 at 8:35 pm #811895Looking close at the pictures there is definately stuff in the corners. Clean them out good and just see if that helps.
They are almost too consistant to be cut wrong.1 September 2023 at 11:51 am #812009Thanks all
Assembled anyway as is a shop project and functions for a drawer to store rags.
Sides are square to the front. Going over things with a vernier it looks like there is a 0.5mm discrepancy between the rebate depth and recess depth. Guess it’s just accumulated inaccuracies which happen to have lead to an equal gap.
@sven-olaf; thanks for the wheel gauge tip. Have used that before but don’t know why I didn’t think of it this time! Surprising how often in reveals inconsistency (at least with my work…)
More practice needed before the next proper project!
Tom
20 October 2023 at 6:12 pm #816796From the photos it does look like the tails are too thin for the pins (and vice versa), as if you had cut on the wrong side of the line after transferring the tails onto the pin board.
This just happened to me too, and for the first time. It took a while, but I finally figured out that the problem. The slot cut into the front for the tails was not quite square. So as I pushed the side board into the slot, it got pushed out a bit. I cleaned that up and the joint closed pretty well.
-
AuthorPosts
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.