This posting was started on the 10th November and has been written as the project progressed... Instead of getting stuck into the project until completion, I had a week where I was busy with other things.
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A few days ago I finally decided I need to pluck up some courage and have a go at Dovetails...
I also need to make a tool chest at some point, therefore, the decision was made to build a smaller practise chest first.
I had a few lengths of budget B-grade Pine 18mm thick and 144mm wide which is really knotty but will (hopefully) do the job. Being my first attempt at dovetails, there is a good chance Im gonna screw up, so no point in wasting good wood - right?
I also have the remains of what looks like a Mahogany desk top with which to make a lid - if I even get that far!
First job was to roughly cut the pine boards to length and glue them together to make wider boards. After glueing I cut them to exact length and made sure they were all square with my shooting board and no#6 plane.
2 sides, a front and back and a bottom piece that hasnt been cut to any specific size yet.
Before laying out the joinery, I thought it best to practice laying out dovetails on a scrap piece of wood using instructions from a book. I wanted to layout the pin & tail spacings using dividers but each time i ended up with incorrect spacings. I even got my girlfriend involved to check my sanity following the instructions line by line and still the method didnt work. Finally I resorted to looking up Dovetail layout on good ol Google.
Ah ha!!!!... The book instructions were wrong! Printing or proof reading error perhaps - who knows, at least I was back on track and could now confidently layout dovetails on the chest. I could have just used common sense but wanted to learn properly - by the book so to speak.
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