Minimum thickness for material?
- This topic has 6 replies, 5 voices, and was last updated 8 years, 3 months ago by .
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
Welcome! / Forums / Project Series / Dovetail Boxes / Minimum thickness for material?
Hey all, I have a little bit of a beginner’s question. I recently had a luthier friend give me some prices of Amazon rosewood. Really gorgeous stuff. I was thinking of making a small dovetail box, yet the thickness of the material has me worried. The pieces are only about 3/16″ thick. Thoughts?
That’s pushing it, I think. That will get pretty thin after you take a couple swipes with the handplane or scraper.
Have you thought about incorporating the rosewood as part of the box such as a veneer, or a box lid in a frame and panel box top? Maybe some string inlay would be a good use, too.
Dovetailing thin material like this will be a challenge. You could make small boxes using a mitered corner. Marty has a nice video on doing small boxes in the Video section of this forum. He does use machines for a lot of his work but machines are not needed. You could do it all with hand tools.
1/4″ is as thin as I’ve gone. I’ve no doubt it could be done if you felt like a challenge.
What you could do is cut the tails in the thin rosewood and use a thicker board for the pins, which is where most of the fiddly exacting work is.
Matt