Re: Thoughts on DT Lay Out
William Duffield, on the Cohansey
>In general, I agree with your choices. For a drawer that tall (in relation to the thickness of the drawer front), three pins works well, but I'll offer a critique on a couple of fine points.
I think your London pattern pins provide insufficient strength to insure the long-term survivability of the drawer. Even if we disregard structural issues and consider only esthetics, I think the width of the pins would look better if they were the same width as the half pins at the top and bottom.
Very small pins also look incongruous on a piece, such as this one, in the Mission style. An important point of the Mission philosophy is the celebration of strong, honest joinery. No one would fault your choice if you made the pins and tails the same width. Personally, I like smaller pins that that, because I wouldn't want someone to think my hand work had been done with a routah (as if my hand work would ever get to that level of precision). Therefore, I try to make the gap between the tails just a bit smaller than the minimal neck of a dovetail routah bit.
You should also strive to saw the pins at the same angle as the half pins. Yours look from the photo as if the pins have a smaller angle. That practice should also make it easier to improve the precision and efficiency of your sawing.
I would only want to go to five tails if the height of the drawer front, and the materials I made if from, and the climatic conditions where the piece will live, would need the extra support to prevent cupping. Otherwise, the extra cutting and chopping wastes time and increases the chances of a mistake damaging the joint during the chopping and bashing together.
An even number of tails usually looks less elegant than an even number. An exception might be when you are making a set of drawers of graduated height. In that case, the abrupt change in size between the widest set of three tails and the adjacent narrowest set of five tails might look worse (when all the joints were shown off together) than an intermediate drawer or two with four tails. That would be a more difficult choice for me to make than some of the other points I discussed.
