Part #2 The Dovetails

After milling and sizing the sides and ends, it was time to layout the dovetails. I use a shop made angle layout jig for the tails. I'm a tails first dovetail person. I know there are folks who do the pins first and there are valid arguments to each procedure. This is how I learned to do them and it works for me.

I use a marking knife for laying out the dovetails and a marking gauge to locate the dept of cuts.

As for cutting the the dovetails, I really like the Japanese pull saw. I only have the Dozuki (cross cut) but it works OK for all of the cuts. Maybe one of these days I'll get a Ryoba and do things the correct way.

Layout of the location of the dovetails was straight forward- I didn't take a bunch of pix during this part-

One of the design problems was that I wanted to keep the tails fairly consistent in width. However, the box will be split after the assembly so the saw kerf will change the dimension of the tail width. To compensate, I needed to make one of the tails slightly wider. I made a full size template in Sketchup to help me figure it all out.

A white artist pencil for labeling all of the pieces to maintain the proper orientation.

A mock-up of one of the corners helped me see how things were going to go together. Including the cut that would eventually separate the top and bottom

You would think, at this point, I would see the giant mistake staring me in the face- but Nooooo!

Next part, the near fatal error and how I fixed it