Rapid layout of dovetails
Bill Tindall, E.Tn.
Rapid layout of dovetails
Chests of drawers are useful heirloom gifts to family and friends. Most bedrooms would be improved by a better and more attractive place to store socks.
I find myself making lots of chests of drawers, and hence, lots of drawers. Because of the repetitive nature of building multiple drawers for a chest of drawers I find this step the least rewarding in a project involving many drawers. I look for ways to take labor out of the process. I used to ponder a dovetail size and half pin size for each project then lay them out traditionally with lots of pencil lines and calculations. There is a better way.
I find no reason to employ more than three sizes of dovetails for all my drawers- large for the drawer backs, medium for fronts and small for small drawers. These can, and should be, sized to suit one’s available chisels. The half pin size is critical. (this is the pin that terminates each side of the drawer)) It needs to be small to look good, yet large enough to not split if the first tail is tight. After some experience and the occasional split half pin, the decision on this optimum size can be decided once and for all.
Having settled on a size for medium to large drawer fronts I thought about the fastest way to layout and cut the tails (I make tails first). If you don’t make a lot of drawers what I am about to describe may strike you as fleetingly interesting. On the other hand, if faced with making 8 drawers for a chest of drawers the decisions and tedious task of laying out the tails on 16 drawer sides may present an opportunity to lessen the tedium.
A layout tool needs to be made for each size of dovetail. In my case it is simply a piece of Lexan fastened to a piece of wood about 5” in length, as shown in the first picture. The Lexan stops short of the wood on each end by the width of the desired drawer half pins. The slot in the Lexan is the pin space between tails. Once this marking device is made the decision of tail size and half tail size becomes recorded in the device and never needs to be made again. Perhaps most important the decision of tail size never has to be created again.
Step 1. Align the end of the wood with the side of the drawer. Using the end of the Lexan as a guide, mark the location of the saw cut for the half tail. These pencil marks are shown in Picture 1 and the process of marking is shown in Picture 2.
Step 2. Mark the center of where the tails will be located. To locate the remaining tail locations divide the space between the half tail marks made in Step 1 using a divider or other means. These marks are shown in Picture 1.
Step 3 Position the marking gauge slot centered on the tail location marks made in Step Two. Using the sides of the slot mark the location for sawing each tail as shown in Pictures 3 and 4.
Step 4. If a guide black is employed to start the saw angle, shown in Picture 5, there is no need to do any additional marking before sawing the tails. Simply position the saw guide on the pencil mark made in Step 3, align the saw with the face of this guide and saw away. By these means I can crank out the drawer sides about as quick as I could route them with a jig.
