Sea Chest
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It is interesting that the 5 degree angle on all four sides doesn’t show up in photos. It is immediately noticeable in person, I guess it’s the binocular vision. In fact, when I cut the sides I thought five degrees was to much.
Very nice. I t looks like you slanted the carcass sides outward and the bottom piece inward. Is that right? Or is the base not angled — it could be an illusion caused by the slanted carcass sides. Oh it is nice to see some carving on the chest. I have been trying some but so far have only added a banding with a simple chip carving to a chest I made.
The bottom is bigger than the top. The skirt around the bottom is vertical.
It really tricks the eye in photos.
In this picture the line at the base of the dovetails is 5 degrees and the pencil line just inside that is square.
Interesting that it appears to be straight sided in all the pictures except the one with the raised lid. Doesnt even appear tapered with the level beside it.
Super looking box and nice carving. It adds a lot to it.When you were marking out for the dovetails, how did you account for the double taper? Did you cut a small rabbet on the inside to aid the alignment? It looks, from the last picture, that you divided the board vertically, carried those markings to the edge to mark the smaller gap between the tails, and then used a standard template to mark the angles (but it may be that optical illusion thing kicking in). Lovely looking box.
Forgive the technical question before the praise, I’m an engineer by trade 🙂Colin, Czech Rep.
Hi Colin, what Ken made are called compound angled dovetails. They require some tricky layout. The trickiest part is cutting accurate compound angled butt joints. They can form a box with either two or all four sides splayed at the same or varying angles. A somewhat less tricky bit is how to layout the dovetails on those compound angled butt joints. The easiest part is actually cutting the dovetails once they are layed out. There are a number of explanations as to how to cut compound angled butt joints on the web, but many of them are designed to show how to lay them out for cutting on a table saw. There are a few that talk about how to cut compound angled dovetails using hand tools. For example there is one by Bob Rozaieski and another by Chad Stanton. I do not remember Paul ever doing them, but I may be mistaken.
Many web sites that talk about them make it sound as if they are (at least nowadays) quite unusual, at least for hand tool workers. But they are found in a number of traditional projects such as sea chests, baby cradles, certain sorts of serving trays, and so on. You need them whenever you want a box to have splayed sides. One last thing — It is relatively easy to layout the dovetails if only two sides are splayed and the other two are straight up and down. It is a good be harder, in my experience, to get things to work if all sides are splayed, and even harder if they are splayed at different angles!
I went at this using the method Bob Rozaieski outlined on his YouTube video. It would be really nice to have an outstanding Paul Sellers video showing it though.
It’s not so much difficult as it is confusing. It’s the kind of thing that I have to get my hands on wood to figure out.
Nice work! I haven’t attempted angled dovetails yet…and, like other commenters, love the carving! Well done, friend…
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