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October 28, 2007 By

Inlaid dovetails – Tutorial, Part 2 (actually cutting tails and pins!)

October 28, 2007

Keywords: inlaid dovetails D4 jig woodworking contrasting wood jointIn Part 2, I actually cut dovetails and pins on the sycamore (primary wood) and on the walnut (which I am using as accent wood in the inlays). Suggestion: Watch Part 1 first, and THEN this one will make a LOT more sense!


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You will notice that I use a climb cutting technique as I start each cut, even when cutting the tails. But climb-cutting will be much more important when I cut the pins, as there is a LOT more waste to remove in the tails boards! My only advice is to take it easy and make only VERY light cuts when you make the climb cuts – if you don’t, the router WILL let you know you are taking too much material in one pass.Let me know with your comments how you like this tutorial. And remember: Part 3 will show the actual cutting of the boards to final inlay thickness.Enjoy!—— Al

Filed Under: Box making, D4, Dovetails, Education, Jigs, Leigh jig, Tutorial, Video Tagged With: , , , , , ,
October 28, 2007 By

Inlaid dovetails – Tutorial, Part 1, The Basics (The Pilot, too!)

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Duration: 14 mins., 22 sec.

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Two hard disk drives later, I was finally able to continue editing this video. What a week this has been with the laptop! The original, 5-year old, 250-GB external disk drive crashed, the replacement I bought lasted exactly 22 hours, but the store replaced it on the spot. I am back up and running, although the video editor has been a little cranky.

Now, the fun stuff:

This is Part 1 of making inlaid dovetails – it covers The Basics. I take you to the point where I just start cutting the dovetails on the tails boards. But it IS important basics, as it shows in detail HOW to open the fingers on the jig, to allow for the thickness of the inlay. Total length: 14 minutes, 22 seconds.

I winged it through the entire shoot with no script, no nothing, and it shows! If it looks a little rough, well…. It IS rough. But I did get through it, and hopefully this tutorial will help someone at some point.

Part 2 is uploading to Blip.tv as I post this, so it should be available later tonight. In Part 2 I will actually cut tails and pins, following all the introductory stuff in Part 1. And Part 3 (later this week???) will show me cutting the pin sockets in the walnut inlays, and assembling the box shell.

You can download the Leigh procedure to create inlaid dovetails at the Leigh Support Page. It is the second Technical Bulletin.

Let me know what you think, and especially leave me feedback so that I can take this blog in the direction that is of interest to many of you. Thanks for watching!

—— Al

Filed Under: Blog, Box making, D4, Dovetails, Education, Jigs, Leigh jig, Tutorial, Video Tagged With: , , , , , ,
October 15, 2007 By

Request for feedback – How about a video tutorial on making inlaid dovetails?

My write-up about the little box with inlaid dovetails resulted in several people being interested in a tutorial on HOW to make these. Therefore, I am planning to tackle this as a video tutorial; I will get busy with it as soon as I finish my current project. In my spare time I have been learning the basics of video on the web; so, be prepared for a real adventure!

Please let me know what you think about such a tutorial, using the Comment form for this post. Simply click on the Add a Comment link immediately below this post.

I use the Leigh D4 dovetail jig. Therefore, I plan to use the D4, and the Leigh procedures, to illustrate the steps. Although this might not be applicable to other jigs, I hope that the video will demystify the procedures involved in creating inlaid dovetails.

I look forward to your feedback!

Al

Filed Under: Blog, Dovetails, Tutorial