After the first experiment and mistakes cutting a dovetail joint, I tried cutting hardwood glues with the router table. The result of making these dovetail assemblies on the router table, as you can see in the photos, is more than satisfactory, with very clean cuts. We usually see this type of wood joints in furniture and wood of higher quality, so going to the trouble of cutting them in spruce wood does not make much sense.
So let’s see how I went about cutting these half blind dovetail joints with the DIY router table.
I already told you in the previous post of this woodworking blog that before starting I had noticed a little problem that I had not counted on while I was thinking about making a fretwork assembly, and that is that the dovetail router that I have has a maximum cutting height of 12mm. This is not a problem when cutting the tails, but we have to take into account that this will be the maximum height of the tails.
If the wood on which we are going to cut the teeth is thicker than 12mm we will find that the glues do not reach the full thickness of the wood. In this case we have three possibilities (excluding the possibility of buying a larger cutter with more cutting height):
-Make a half blind dovetail joint, like the one I make in the video and we see in the photos, very useful if we want to make drawers with a smooth front.
-To cut a rabbet in the back of the wood where we will cut the teeth and thus bring the tails forward, so that they are visible from the front. This can be interesting to make a trunk, although you will see some tails with the front wider than the front of the teeth. Although you can always make a rebate on the tails to match the teeth.
-Cut a rabbet in the front part of the wood where we will cut the teeth, and after making the joint, hide the rabbet with a strip or a simple molding. This way we can make a drawer with a decorative molding on the front.
The first intention was to cut the gaps between teeth by hand, using a handsaw, scroll saw (thinking of the fretwork assembly) and chisel. I even made a test that you can see in the central photo above, but once it was done I stopped to think about how to do the same thing with the milling table.
In any case, many of you will be interested in how to make these hand-jointing wood, learning how to distribute the dovetails and teeth, how to make the cuts with the rib saw or the Japanese saw and how to correctly use the chisel to carve the necessary holes in the wood. In this case, I recommend a careful reading of the article “.Spikes and bushings. The thesis“(it seems that he closed the blog, it’s a pity), where Julio explains the whole procedure in detail.
And if you want to see another interesting joint, take a look at how to make an impossible dovetail joint in curve.
