debor054

Yesterday was my birthday, and it seems that my girlfriend has secretly been practising her dovetails ... in cake!

I decided to make use of my newly acquired antique oak mainly to see what it will look like when planed and finished. I also decided some more dovetails wouldn't do me any harm. So, in the same style as my last dovetailed box  I got started. I wont go into great detail as the build process has obviously been covered before. Usual drill - cut the four pieces to make the box sides and shoot them to exact length. Exact length being - two pairs, each pair being exactly the same size - I didn't bother to measure actual length. I also made the effort to avoid all knots and only used clear straight grained pieces of Pine. The next stage, mark out the dovetails, I'm still a tails first guy... and ... I got to try the new Poor Mans Moxon vice out properly. My brain obviously hadn't woken up yet ... Look at my 'waste marks' ... phew! Luckily, I realised what I had done, before grabbing the saw! I got the tails cut and chiselled out without any further mishap. Wow! ..What...

Up until now I have been struggling with work holding on my little bench and its poor excuse for a face vice, especially if I need to hold a wide board for dovetailing for example. My usual solution is to stand the end of the board on something below the vice and pinch one side of the board in the end of the vice and use an offcut to minimise the vice racking and hope it holds... Far from ideal! Therefore, with my last dry (it hasn't stopped raining over here in the UK) scaffold board, I decided to make a poor mans version of the Moxon Vice  (Utube). Life started out by rough cutting the board to length. Raised beds function really well as saw horses. While sawing the board the cross cut saw started to bind indicating that there seemed to be a lot of internal stresses inside the wood. I had to finish the cut from the opposite side, at least its only a rough cut.   The next step was to rip the board into two pieces using my 5 ppi rip saw.   Again the saw started to b...

After attempting my first dovetails around November last year, I haven't built upon the experience or attempted any other dovetails since. The Small Pine Chest was (and still is) my favourite project so far and I think I got very lucky with some quite tidy joints for a beginner. I decided it was time to attempt to repeat the experience, almost knowing ahead of time that the first time was a fluke, and so to prepare for disappointment. The idea for this project came from a small piece of Oak I had which was an offcut from the first ever thing I made . I decided it would make a nice lid for a box, and this with a length of 6" wide Pine board formed my stock. I wont bore you too much with the starting process, needless to say that the bench hook, tenon saw and square, chisel and knife saw to cutting the pine to length, before using my no#4 plane and shooting board to shoot the ends clean. Having all my components to size, I started to get a feel for the finished box. After cutt...