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carcase-woodworking-joint Joinery is a part of woodworking that involves joining together pieces of wood or lumber, to produce more complex items. Some wood joints employ fasteners, bindings, or adhesives, while others use only wood elements. The characteristics of wooden joints - strength, flexibility, toughness, appearance, etc. - derive from the properties of the materials involved and the purpose of the joint. Therefore, different joinery techniques are used to meet differing requirements. For example, the joinery used to. Woodworking Joints. Wooden structure are either frames or boxes (carcases). Joints are needed at the corners and where the pieces crossover. Frame Joints. Butt joints are the most basic joint where the corner is joined by glue and/or pins. Butt joints are commonly used in modern construction and then reinforced with steel plates. This reduces the need for skilled labour and allows rapid fabrication of frames such as roof trusses. Bridle joint. This is a strong joint which can also be reinforced with pegs. Wood joints is a woodworking process that is performed to join pieces of wood together in order to create complicated parts. There are different techniques used when producing joints depending on the type of wood joint to be produced. For instance, the method used to construct house joinery can be different from that used to make cabinet joint, though some concept can overlap. Types of woodworking joints: Below are the various types of wood joints you can use for your projects: Butt Joint. Solid wood frames hide plywood edges, so you can skip the face carcase woodworking joint or edge banding. The perfect example is a jewelry box, or other small-box build. Butterfly Keys Made Easy. The pocket holes require two joont operations. Jason Carcase woodworking joint Jason C 5, 12 12 gold badges 34 34 silver badges 79 79 bronze badges.

The answers to your questions are: 1. Almost any species of wood will do fine for your workbench. There is no quality difference between Veritas and Lie-Nielsen handplanes. Eagle, and sometimes plov. When I stop answering my phone and…. Being able to spot a potential problem is the gift of experience, but it is also like a tranquilizer dart used to take down a rabid African elephant.

Today I was cleaning up the sliding dovetail socket for the fourth and final leg of this French-style workbench…. To modern eyes, old-school workbenches look like they are going to self-destruct. The legs are tenoned into the benchtop which moves with the seasons. Something has to give, right? After a little tweaking of the mortise, the first leg went in.

Assuming, that is, I…. I started cutting the mortises and the dovetail sockets in the benchtop today and I can tell you a few things: 1. Things I hate: Gouging my own eyes out with a spoon, and being pulled away from a project for more than a couple days. This morning I sneaked into the shop and hid there for three hours….

It was easy going until my enormous saw suddenly stopped cutting. Had the flesh-detecting technology in my tenon saw kicked in? A few weeks ago I posted a blog entry about using a flush-cut saw to slice tenon shoulders.

I must have written it poorly because several readers requested a video of the process. So here you go. A couple details and thoughts: 1. My joints are tight and I get things done. Heck, I can even teach dovetailing to others when pressed. Tenons require a lot of precision sawing if you want to avoid farting around with a shoulder plane, chisel or float.

And teaching others to cut perfect shoulders is a challenge. I usually…. My next project is a close copy of a walnut side table from the White Water Shaker community. I spent a summer afternoon measuring the project and…. Dovetail maestro Rob Cosman again makes us all feel inadequate with his latest video in which he cuts a half-blind dovetail joint in 6 minutes and 52 seconds. Cosman uses Northern white pine, which you might think is cheating , he can cut the tail in one stroke.

However, his pins are so skinny just…. In his efforts to stop the chair from wobbling, he kept cutting down the legs until they would look about right if they were attached to an opossum.

The ad is a…. Everything else about miter joints is a hassle. But there are ways to minimize those…. Tablesaw Box Joints A shop-made jig with micro-adjust guarantees perfect joints. Strong, great-looking and quickly made, box joints are an especially good choice when you have a large number of items to produce.

To make them, you need your tablesaw, a miter…. Perfect Butt Joints in Laminate An underscribe router attachment guarantees success. By Brad Holden Long countertops or those that turn corners need butt joints. You can use several methods to make this joint, but the easiest way to get tight-fitting, professional-looking results is with an underscribe attachment on a trim router.

The term underscribe…. During the Woodworking in America Conference, there were two quotes that really stood out from all the bon mots that were hurled. Even though I am percent confident in my ability to join two boards together using the tail-of-the-bird joint, I am always riveted when I get to see how other accomplished woodworkers go about the task.

In fact, when I watch others work, I never fail to pick up some important details. On Saturday at our…. Back in June, some of you might remember that I was building an Ohio copy of a fascinating three-legged Chinese stool. And some of you might also remember how I flamed out at the very end of the project, cutting a single tenon at the wrong angle, ruining the entire thing with no time to…. Question: I often see dovetail layout lines left showing on the exterior of pieces.

However, the lines do not uniformly show on all edges. This morning I decided to repair the vintage Chinese stool that we knocked apart earlier this year. Senior Editor Robert W.

I need that…. Big cauls are the answer. A caul is simply a thick, straight board. I make my cauls from stiff wood, such as…. By Seth Keller After I learned to cut tapered legs on the jointer, I never went back to my bandsaw or tablesaw.

Legs cut on the jointer take less time and, best of all, require a whole lot less sanding. This is…. One of best ways to learn how a piece of furniture is put together is to take it apart.

Many of the best furniture makers I know who work in historical styles have done a fair bit of restoration or conservation work Last week at the Woodworking in America: Furniture Construction and Design conference, all….

In early Gustav Stickley pieces, doors with divided lights were joined with mitered mullions. My reply has always been: Better too much than too little. And because I am working on a book which should be out this fall on English furniture construction circa , I took an afternoon during my visit to prowl one of the largest…. In my review of drawbore pins in the Summer issue, one of my gripes with many of the tools were the round handles.

A round handle plus a round pin equals a tool on the floor. My vintage pins had tapered octagonal handles. They stay put on the bench. I praised the Lee Valley…. During the early stages of learning to cut dovetails, I foolishly tried to read everything I could on the topic. It was foolish because it would probably take two lifetimes in dog years even to….

Do you like stories about gladiators? How about stories about idiot woodworking editors? This week I was finishing up work on the joined Chinese stool for the cover of the Autumn issue of Woodworking Magazine.

I took the components to my shop at home , mostly to avoid all the scatological jokes we all…. With every project there is always some tool that deserves an Academy Award-style acceptance speech.

Traditional cut nails can be made from pretty soft steel, especially the useful cut headless brads. As a result, you have to be careful when installing them. Here are some of the things that can go wrong and how I deal with them. Your pilot hole is too shallow. One early book on woodworking…. When making through-mortises by hand, one of the occasional problems is that you get a little mallet happy, you drive the mortise chisel a little too deep and you blow out a piece of grain on the exit side.

Or you drive a too-tight tenon into the through-mortise, the tenon hits the rim of the…. One of my hobbies is chairmaking.

That statement might sound kinda dumb. Making stick chairs uses another part of my brain. And any time I venture into building chairs I have to re-learn some of the rules. In some ways, chairmaking…. In the tool world there is an ugly and erroneous slur.

Anyway, I have no dog in this fight. The real point was that today while I…. I like a good carcase saw in the same way I like to eat most parts of the pig. I like the way that its well-tuned crosscut teeth slice into the grain and leave behind a glassy smooth cut. I like how easy the saws are to start. As a result I almost always get the stink eye from the others in the shop. What are horns? This is when you make your stiles longer than they need to be, usually….

While I own an electric plunge router and all manner of bits and guides, I tend to cut my stopped dados using hand tools for a couple reasons. And two: The hand-tool method involves less…. For those of you who chisel out all your waste when dovetailing, this post is not for you. Please move along. I have. There are lots of people who will show you how to handplane the edge of a board.

A few less who will show you how to really flatten the wide face of a board. A smaller number will show you how to flatten a glued-up panel stay tuned , that tutorial is already written and….

Developing your eye , plus your ability to sense the perpendicular , will do more for your dovetailing skills than any…. While my dad was sleeping off the flu in February, I was plundering his drawers. The man has an English chest problem like I have a hammer problem. I pulled out all the drawers of his six or seven 19th-century chests of drawers and gave a close look at their construction details. One of the…. But what is really astonishing about the mallet is how it….

In the shop, my mechanical pencil is as important as my eyeglasses. I use a mechanical pencil with a 0. I like the really thin lead because I can usually drop it into a knife line and , with just light….

When most people think about cutting dovetails, they think: handsaws. They can create gaps or help prevent them. Plow planes are some of the easiest joinery planes to use , once you know a few tricks to getting good results. Milford Brown writes: Since you are interested in the older hand-powered woodworking, I wonder what, if anything, you know about the history of marking knife use?

I recently had occasion to dismantle an old pine blanket chest because of extensive powderpost beetle damage in the sapwood edges of its top and bottom boards that had…. While teaching a class on handsawing a couple years ago, one student lost his cool. He was cutting a tenon for his sawbench, and he strayed over the line and the result looked rough to him. He grunted, threw his saw down with a clatter and stomped away from the bench.

The classroom got real…. When I glue up panels from several narrow boards, I use my jointer plane to dress all the mating edges. So I find it easier to dress my edges by hand than to fuss with the powered jointer…. I noticed the head on my trusty Hamilton hammer was loose last weekend as I was driving a bunch of nails good thing I have an extra hammer or two.

This morning I decided to do something about it. Conventional wisdom is that the head works loose because of the shock that the tool is…. In my kindergarten class, someone was snitching cookies from the lunchboxes of the rest of the class.

Spoiler alert: It was the fat kid. That clever monkey got out of a speeding ticket by saying he was trying to…. Blacksmith David Maydole was the SawStop of the 19th century.

Sometimes hammerheads would fly loose from their handles on the job site. This could be troublesome or deadly because occasionally the steel head would strike a fleshy one the steel usually wins this competition.

Some of the best workholding ideas rely on simple wedging action. This weekend I stumbled onto one more great wedging trick using cut nails. This might be old hat for you. If so, forgive my waste of bandwidth which should be the motto of my blog. The most stressful glue-up of my life was assembling my tool chest in The main carcase had mating surfaces that had to be glued.

Foolishly, I chose yellow glue as the adhesive. As a result, another editor and I spent an hour furiously beating and clamping the chest together.

In the end, there…. I got interested in David Maydole, the father of the legendary adze-eye hammer. There are so many ways to construct a drawer that someone could write an entire book on the variations across time and cultures.

Drawer slips are narrow pieces of wood that are grooved to accept the…. Making Cathedral Doors A complete recipe for making beautiful cathedral raised-panel doors. By George Vondriska Cathedral raised-panel doors are beautiful, but they can be intimidating to make. Stile and Rail Joinery A reversible stile and rail cutter makes perfect-fitting frames for doors and cabinets without dowels, mortises or biscuits. By Tim Johnson One of the best buys you can make for your tablemounted router is a set of stile and rail cutters.

These cutters allow you to join frame pieces together at…. You can do fancy things with a hammer and the right nails. The more I learn about nails, the more I…. Even though most dovetail jigs are basically the same, some….

Tips for Building Cabinets with Pocket-Hole Joinery New tools and improved techniques make pocket-screw assembly faster than ever. There are no unsightly face-frame nail holes to fill. And you…. Lock Miters This simple set-up process guarantees perfect joints! By George Vondriska Lock miters are strong, attractive joints that make assembly easy. Well,no more excuses. After watching Frank Klausz cut a set of dovetails in three minutes using a special bowsaw blade see the video here in our video section , Rob Cosman decided to show that it can be done by cutting the tails first.

Frank cuts his pins first. Want one? Exhibit A is over at WKfinetools. You can shorten the workpiece a hair with a quick touch of the disc. You can also adjust the angle by a fraction of a degree.

Instead of…. Even better, I had a mentor with an incredible collection. Owen Riley was a photographer at the newspaper where I worked, and he…. Whenever John Economaki of Bridge City Tools teaches classes about furniture design, he always asks his students a question that seems to have no good answer. The question goes something like this: Would you rather have a piece of furniture with great lines but so-so craftsmanship, or a somewhat dumpy-looking project with perfect and crisp….

David Thiel, then an associate editor at the magazine, has been assigned to give me a…. When I first opened the package, I assumed that the tool inside was a prototype that had a plastic blade. But no, the white chunk of stuff at the end of the Gladstone…. As woodworkers dive into handwork, they usually start with a block plane, then the bench planes, the saws and the joinery planes.

Joinery planes , such as plow planes, router planes, shoulder planes and rabbeting planes, are some of the easiest planes to set up and use. Their irons are straightforward to sharpen no curves…. Our goal for these columns is to show that attractive, well made projects can be made with a minimal amount of tools and time.

For me, finger joints have always been the nerdy, square cousin to the dovetail. Finger joints are immensely strong when glued properly.

But they are usually used by beginning woodworkers in places where a dovetail would be more appropriate, such as on a piece of 18th-century casework. Add to that the fact that finger joints…. There is something deep inside our DNA that ties us to the chest as a form of furniture. First off, how many other kinds of furniture do we have that are named after critical parts of our own bodies? I am planning to order a corner chisel, to use when I install hinges, and have seen several styles.

Which do you prefer? The piece of wood has a routed mortise with rounded corners. The corners need…. Cut by Eye When dovetailing by hand, be bold. After gauging a thickness line across the board, lay out the pins with your saw as you make each cut. Trust your eye to find a…. Some tools are like high school girlfriends. Other tools are like good spouses. The relationship gets better with time, even when you are both a little worn around the edges.

And there were a couple things I was wondering about. One is the question of glue longevity. If I glue together a tabletop with…. This weekend I put the finishing touches on two Stickley tabourets; and while the little tables turned out to my satisfaction, the construction process proved quite vexing considering there are only nine pieces of wood in each.

The theme of Issue 9 is sawing , understanding sawtooth technology and how to use that knowledge in…. Plus the projects are fast and , if I do…. Sometimes your woodworking improves like a slow and steady climb up a mountain. Sometimes, however, you get to ride the elevator. Then I traded up to a mechanical pencil, which never needed sharpening. Then one day I found my old…. Whenever I get into some serious handwork, I always try to boil down the processes so that I can 1 remember it myself and 2 occasionally explain it to others including a couple children who are slack-jawed with boredom.

Today as I was cleaning up the half-lap joints for the Stickley tabouret on my…. Men have become the tools of their tools. My aversion to the machine had nothing to do with safety, accuracy, philosophy or…. I enjoy a good beating. Chopping dovetails or mortises is almost as pleasurable as sawing or planing.

For years I tried to make myself like the traditional round mallet used in carving and cabinetmaking. When this happens, it takes you back to the blog entry, but your comment is still unposted and at the bottom of the page. If you enter your code…. Contemporary writing on woodworking, of which I am woefully guilty, always seeks to make the craft as simple as possible.

We try to make the joints easy, quick and straightforward. We tend to promote furniture designs that have straight lines and wide appeal. Yet the grain in the stretchers near the floor runs horizontally. One of my favorite tasks in the shop is making solid-wood tabletops. Before using a router bit, I dress the edge with a diamond file, and I usually touch up the chisel before machine cutting mortises.

Sharp is good, but…. Question: Looking over the current and Fine Woodworking Box Joints past issues of Woodworking Magazine, I see how drawboring or wedging a mortise and tenon joint will improve the strength and fit of the joint. But is there a reason to pick either drawboring or wedging over the other technique in terms of the strength or durability of the….

In the Stickley side table from the November issue, there are enough variations of mortise and tenon joints to give your hands and your head a real workout. One of the things I enjoy most about woodworking is puzzing out how to do things. This is the top of one of the back legs.

However, cut nails can sometimes be difficult to find. Tremont Nail is an…. If you do any work at all with hand tools, a good marking gauge is an essential piece of equipment. One of the best things about going to an exhibit of new or antique furniture is getting to examine the joinery , closely and from the inside of the piece.

I will pull every drawer out if allowed , stick my head in a carcase and send my fingers probing into the darkest voids. Like most home woodworkers, my dang day job tends to get in the way of my woodworking. Gerunds, appositives and dangling participles have all conspired to keep me chained to this keyboard. Some projects play along nicely; others tend to fight you all the way.

The Creole Table is shaping up to be a bit of a raging Cajun. My goal this week was to complete the top of the table and cut the curved transitions between the apron and cabriole legs. The walnut for the top…. One of the big challenges in building a project for publication is to come up with techniques that use common tools and skills to produce results that others can replicate using the same tools and techniques.

I like working with walnut, but I hate marking it. Its dark color makes pencil lines disappear. And its open grain hide knife lines as well. Dovetailing is a particular problem for me. But even if I…. I always enjoy tours of tool factories to see people or robots make things that are useful to my work. How a company can harness hundreds of minds and hands and mechanical pincers to produce things is fascinating, and every tour is surprising and different.

After finishing college, two of my closest friends joined the Peace Corps and were posted to rural Morocco. But within a year they were back in the United States: 20 pounds lighter, two shades paler and singularly disillusioned. Their job in Morocco could be boiled down to one simple lesson for the villagers: Do not…. In China, was the year of the rooster. In our shop, was the year of the anvil.

We built a guillotine out of framing material and dropped anvils of three weights on joints to see how they fail. We learned a few things.

First: You can get paid for doing juvenile stuff with…. Trestle tables have always looked notoriously spindly and rickety to my eye. Add to the fact that they are normally quite lengthy, and it seems like you have a recipe for a wobbly mealtime. But after inspecting a fair number of historical examples….

So it should come as no surprise that…. One of my favorite movies as a teen-ager had a scene where a s-era G-man goes to a mystic for help in becoming a superhero. The G-man shows the mystic , named Sombra , a photo of a caped hero and asks for a magic word to become like him. One of the themes coursing through the next issue of Woodworking Magazine is rethinking the role of nails in woodworking.

Perhaps the most frustrating part of using cut nails was…. A fair number of historical texts recommend this with large-scale joints particularly in timber framing. When I do…. Have you ever wondered why there are specific rules for the sizes of mortise-and-tenon joints?

Did you know there are rules? If you consult the 19th and early 20th century texts, they state that tenons should be one-third the thickness of your stock. And that the tenons should be five times as long as they…. One of the curious aspects of investigating drawboring has been the mystery surrounding antique drawbore pins. Almost all of the examples of pins I come across are big , too big for cabinet work, really.

I do have set of boxwood-handles pins…. During a demonstration of drawboring I gave a few weeks…. The historically correct shape of the drawbore pin shown in our Autumn issue has come into question this week.

There is a lot to know about nails. I built the cabinet from the first issue I used cherry and spalted maple — it came out pretty nice. I have looked and looked and can not find a reference to these…. Many cabinets with shelves are built using a common method: You plow dados in the sides of the cabinet. And then you glue the shelves into the dados. Perhaps you glue on a face frame to the carcase; perhaps not.

With glue alone, this is a questionable joint. The end grain of the shelf joins…. In looking at a lot of old fine furniture, you might be surprised how much of it is made using nails. I think the problem comes from the fact that we are using the wrong nail. Most nails today are…. Instead you show pocket screws. Long answer: The original Gustav Stickley 79 magazine stand was available in a few….

Tricks of the Trade. Board-Stretching Joint. Continue Reading. Joyners vs. Carpenters, Lock Miter Setup Jig. Impossible Dovetails.

Beadlock Pro Joinery Kit. Feature Articles. An Ideal Joint for Small Drawers. Butterfly Keys Made Easy. Mitered Half-lap Joinery. Jasmine Jewelry Box. Kreg K5. Finger-Joint Table. Dowels and Tenons with a Grip. Shop Blog. The Maloof Chair Joint. Woodworking Blogs. Show Your Bandsaw Some Love. Woodworking Videos. Video: Joinery in Curvy Furniture. Tongue and Groove Joinery. Make Clean Through-Mortises.

Frame Miter Joints. Box Clever, Use Box Cleats. American Woodworker Blog. Questions And Answers. Woodworking Books. Learning from Windsor Chair Joints. Router Table Box Joints. A New Manual for Biscuit Joiners. Chris Schwarz Blog. Breadboard Ends — 5 Approaches. Tools in Your Shop. Woodworking Daily Blog. Pros and Cons of Routers for Joinery. Hand Tools Techniques. Loose Tenon Joinery. Pocket Screws with Fine Furniture. Defective Dovetail Diagnosis.

Dovetails of Flavors. Fitting Drawers One Piece at a Time. Drawboring Resurrected. Chris Schwarz Woodworking Classes.

Dovetails with Help from the Drill Press. New Workbench Build. Woodworking Hand Tools. Secret Dovetails for the Rest of Us. Cut Accurate and Clean Rabbets. Power Tools. Better Dados for Casework. Product Spotlight. On Symmetry and Screwing Up. Installing a Drawer Stretcher. Slideshow: Cutting Keyed Miter Joints. Personal Favorites. Roorkhee Chair: First Look. Better Than Measuring.

Handplane Techniques. Raw Materials. Exploit the Weakness of the Tree. Cut Rabbets by Hand. Cutting Tenons on a Table Saw. Look Ma, No Clamps. A Pause in the Hostilities. A Slightly Fancier Tool Chest. Spacing Dovetails with Dividers — a Little History.

The Case for Hidden Joinery. Marking and Measuring. The Black Knife. Other Projects. Making Frames. Quick Jigs for Flat and Square Glue-ups.

Table Saw Safety. Speed Tenons — Safely. Perfect Edge Joints. How I Glue Chair Mortises. Amaze your friends with quadrilateral and rising dovetails. Router-enhanced Dovetails. Easy Curvaceous Edge Joints. New Connector System from Lamello. Slip-fit Corrects a Slip in Planning. Iron Out Those Dents. Helical Cutterhead Makes Better Tenons. Hand-cut Dovetails 2. Trust Yourself. Trust No One. Darwin, Roubo and a Sickening Sound. Full-size Pattern of the Folding Bookstand.

Another Translation. Another Use. Another Bookstand. Reader Questions. Sawing Techniques. Need a Moxon Double-screw Vise? Making Plans: A Bookcase from the Beginning. Video Tip: Clenching a Nail with Confidence. Match Mortise Size Without Measuring. Weird Wooden Nail? It's the Bit. An Unusual Shape for Wooden Nails. A Dovetail a Day — Hurray. General Tools recently announced the release of the E.

Woodworking In America. Dueling Dovetails. Smith Screwdrivers — Not Neighborly. Details on the Divided-light Door. A Week at The Windsor Institute. The Good Kind of Wedgie. Schwarz on Workbenches. It is a simple and clean way to make things and it appeals to my sensibilities of construction and design.

Slab sides just means that all four sides of a carcase are each made from a single slab, either one piece of wood or several edge glued pieces. Very rarely will you find stock wide enough for one-piece sides, so learning to joint edges quickly and cleanly is essential. The Handplanes chapter goes over edge planing in more detail. I think the most important thing to remember when gluing up panels is to always place the pretty side of a board out, regardless of the orientation of the growth rings of each board.

As long as the wood you are using is dry, you should not have any problems with warping. A lot still needs to happen such as edge jointing, flattening the panel, joinery etc. I only plane enough of the face to see the grain or color in order to get a better match. Next on the list is to have plenty of clamps on hand prior to spreading any glue. After jointing all the edges of a panel I glue it together.

Panels are one of the easiest things to glue up. As with all glue ups, dry clamp to find any problem areas. Should the joint not close up with only light hand pressure, take it apart and re-plane the surfaces. Never close up a gap in a glue joint with clamp pressure. Next, I place newspaper on the joints where they cross a clamp to avoid getting iron stains on the panel. I stand up the boards on the clamps and spread a layer of yellow glue on only one edge of each joint with a palette knife.

It takes a certain touch to lay on just the right amount of glue, but this is easily learned with practice. I like to have a small amount of squeeze out on both the top and the bottom.

After laying down the boards and pushing the joints together I close up the clamps with moderate pressure. Torquing down on the clamps will not make a better joint and it could pop things out of alignment. If you have problems with the end of a joint slipping around just place a spring clamp or small C-clamp across the joint prior to tightening up the other clamps.

After all the clamps are snugged up and the glue takes on an initial set you can remove it. If the middle of the panel is the problem you may be able to push things into alignment with wedges.

Slip them under your pipe clamps prior to tightening them all the way. If this does not work you may have to take more drastic measures. One time I even had to have my wife stand on a tabletop I was gluing up.

By the time I tightened up all the clamps she was able to step down. As for removing the rest of the clamps, I like to leave them on overnight.

After glue up, flattening and squaring up the parts of a carcase, I cut the dovetails to hold it all together. I still have the first dovetails that I ever cut, and they are pretty bad to tell you the truth. But I have gotten a little better since then. Dovetails have quite the reputation, sometimes good and sometimes bad, and to say the least they are about the best way to join the corners of just about any piece of wood.

They are the nemesis of many a woodworker and you are going to have to cut them well and also quick if you are going to call yourself a cabinetmaker. They are not that difficult to cut, and once you get into a rhythm they can be cut quite fast. But when first learning to cut dovetails, relax. Worry about getting things right not about how fast you can cut them, speed will come in time.

Square up your stock and set a marking gauge a bit wider than the thickness of your stock. This bit of extra lets the endgrain of the tails and pins protrude a little. Scribe all the way around each end with the gauge. This is the base line for your dovetails. Place one of your tail boards upright in your vise. Just make the spacing appropriate to the job at hand.

Set dividers to your spacing and walk off the dividers on the end grain of the tail piece. First use your backsaw to cut down at an angle suitable for your tails. These are not large differences and there is no effort to create variations but the natural result of using hand tools. It is well worth teaching yourself to do this for the simple reason it will save time. Next, remove the waste with a coping saw just above the scribe line.

Pare to this base line and you are ready to cut the pins. When paring, take extra care to keep the inside corners crisp and clean. It really makes a difference on the finished joint. Use the tail piece to mark out the pin board. I put the pin board into my vise and place the just cut tail board onto this. I cut down right next to the line with a backsaw and leave a little of the line for fitting. If you overshoot either sawing or paring of the pin, all you have to do is glue a thin shim to the pin and try again.

I use a coping saw to remove the waste between the pins. Place the blade into the kerf and just above the baseline twist the blade as you begin the cut. Concentrate on pivoting the blade before you start to cut along the line. Finish up by paring to the line with a sharp chisel. When I am finished sawing and paring of the pin board, I try out the fit.

Once you get them started tap them with a block and hammer and pay attention to the sound of your hammer. It starts to ping when the joint is too tight, and this can help you pinpoint areas that still need work.

Pare off the tight spots then see if the joint will go all the way together. The trick to getting dovetails apart without damage is a block and hammer.

Take the offending boards out of the vise. Hold the pin board up, place the block on the inside corner and smack the block, this will force the tail board out of the pins. Once the joint goes all the way together check to see if the pins protrude past the tails.

The pins should stick out just past the tail piece, plane them off almost flush so they do not get in the way of your clamps during glue up. This eliminates the need for odd clamping blocks, which tend to just fall off mid way through clamp up. Half blind dovetails are not any harder to cut and if you want to conceal some of the joinery on your work you need to learn to cut these as well.

Use the inside face as a reference for the gauge when marking the pin board. Also scribe the thickness of the tail board onto the inside face of your pin board, I have a second gauge set up for this step. Cut out the tail boards the same as any through dovetails and use these to mark out the location and angle of the half blind pins.

Once again, I use a mill knife to mark these lines. Once marked, you can remove the waste on the half-blind pins. Saw down the pins at an angle just short of your lines. Chop out the waste with registered chisels and pare to your lines with bench chisels. Be extra careful when fitting as you not only have to fit the pins but the endgrain of the tails needs to fit right up against the socket you cut in the pin board.

Make sure they are not too tight or they will force open the joinery around the pins. When all is said and done, but prior to glue up, plane off all the exterior scribe marks. When deciding on the layout of my dovetails, there are some rules I always follow. When dovetailing an upright carcase, the top and bottom pieces are the tail pieces with the pins cut on the sides to keep the cabinet from spreading.

It probably never will but I still make things this way. With exposed joinery, the tails are always on the front, I feel this is the only way that looks right. On drawers, the sides are always the tail piece because the force of opening and closing is opposed when made this way.

If the glue ever failed the drawer will stay together as long as you leave it in the case. When dovetailing drawers, I always plan for the groove for the bottom panel to exit in a tail.

This ensures that it does not show once the drawer is complete. Also, you have probably read somewhere that you should always end or start with a half pin, while this is sensible, there are always exceptions to the rule and for me carcases are one place I make exceptions, as I always end the dovetails at the back of the carcase with a half tail because it makes the rabbet for the back panel easier to cut.

Prior to glue up, I cut a rabbet on the back edge of all the case pieces with a rabbet plane. The rabbet plane I use for this is fitted with a fence and a depth stop. The width of the rabbet is set by the thickness of the back panel and generally I make the depth just over half the thickness of the carcase side. I do this by eye; with practice you will find it very easy to do. This bevel makes it possible to get a piston fit for the back panel.

But more on that in the section that covers the back panel. I used to use a backsaw and router plane to do this but it was tedious and time consuming. The 45 makes things much faster and you end up with a cleaner result. After setting up my 45 and removing the fence, I tack a thin batten onto the carcase side to guide the plane.

I use small nails to do this and I just re-use this batten at each dado. Often I use a knife to assist the spur cutters with the cross grain so there is no tear out at the back and edges of the dadoes.

Cutting down into the back edge of the dado with a backsaw is helpful in preventing blowouts as well. As always, dry fit and dry clamp your joinery. This will help you spot areas that could be a problem during glue up. Make sure you have plenty of clamps, a hammer and block of wood to pound a stubborn joint home and go bars to pop a carcase square.

And remember, the simpler you make glue ups the better off you are. Pipe clamps are very handy and a heck of a lot cheaper than bar clamps and they are also much easier to extend when gluing up large carcases. As long as your pipe clamps are threaded on both ends you can make longer clamps with only a pipe connector to connect the two pieces of pipe. When gluing up a large piece, the glue may start to set before you get the case all the way together and the hammer and block can remedy the situation before it gets critical.

Use only enough glue to give yourself a little squeeze out. Work like a madman to get the corners closed up before the glue starts to set up. Wait a few minutes for the glue to take on an initial set and remove the clamps.

Eliminate the problem by removing the clamps after the glue starts to set. As I mentioned earlier, now is also a good time to plane off the protruding endgrain if there is any. To do this I measure the diagonals of the box, door, or drawer I am gluing together. I use a folding rule with a sliding end for most pieces.

I only unfold as much as I need not the whole thing. The measurement that you end up with is not important only that the measurement of each diagonal is the same or at least darn close. If your carcase or drawer is out of square push it square now. Small items will usually stay put, but a large carcase may require extra support to hold it square.

I find this very easy to do with go bars. When forced into the corners, they will force that particular diagonal longer and shorten the other. The hammer and block mentioned earlier brings to mind something I saw while I was at school. Jim Krenov was gluing up something and working like a madman to get it done and I thought great, I am not the only one who semi-panics during a glue up.

Then I thought, crap, he has been doing this for over 40 years and glue up is still a panic…. I use quite a bit of exposed joinery but I try to keep it subdued and make sure it fits in with the parts around it.

Fixed shelves and dividers are a good example of this. At each dado I fit a crosspiece with a through dovetail. Just make sure you remove enough material in this notch so the crosspiece does not spread the carcase. It should be a slip fit into the dado with no slack. I cut this dovetail a little differently than dovetails used to hold corners together.

I saw out a shoulder with a backsaw and pare the angle of the tail with a bench chisel. To cut the slot at the front of the dado for this tail, I put the cross piece into the carcase and mark directly from the tail with a sharp scratch awl. I use a marking gauge to set the depth of the cut and a square to mark the sides of the dovetail slot. Cut shy of the line with a backsaw. Remove the waste with a coping saw just above the depth line then pare to fit.

For a shelf or divider, I go ahead and glue in the crosspiece at this point. This way it can be glued to a rail or stile in the back panel.

Gluing the back edge to the back panel adds considerable stiffness to a large carcase. Drawer blade is just a fancy name for a mortise and tenon frame that a drawer rides on. I think the name is of English origin, but I am not sure. Using this term helps avoid confusion with other parts of the cabinet. A drawer blade is made up of four parts, a front crosspiece, two runners, and a back crosspiece. Fitting a drawer blade starts the same as a fixed shelf, but there is some extra joinery involved.

After fitting the front crosspiece, you have to cut mortises into the back side prior to gluing it in.

These mortises are for tenons on the runners that the drawers ride on. The runners slip into the dadoes, and then slide forward into the mortises. The back crosspiece has tenons that fit into mortises at the back of the runners. The crosspiece at the back keeps the runners tight in their dadoes in the case sides. I make this back crosspiece slightly thinner than the runners so it does not interfere with the drawers.

It is important not to get any glue in the dado when gluing in the runners or the back crosspiece as the runners of the drawer blade run cross grain to the carcase side it is fitted to.

I always finish the back of my cabinets and about the only way I do this is with a frame and panel that is set flush with the sides of the carcase. For detailed notes on how I make my frame and panels, see the Making Doors chapter. The reason it is difficult lies in the way most people fit a back panel, a square rabbet with a square edge panel.

Done this way, you only have one good chance for a snug fit. There is a much better and easier way, simply put an angle on the rabbet in the carcase, then bevel the back panel to match. Putting an angle on the rabbet allows you to work up to a glue line free joint and also makes glue up a snap, with very little if any squeeze out.

Since you have already beveled the rabbet in the carcase, all you have to do now, is make the back panel slightly oversize. Once the back panel is assembled and the glue is dry, remove the clamps and carefully bevel the edges of the panel to match the rabbet.

For the first test fit, the panel should still be proud. Remove the back panel and plane the edges carefully, while maintaining the bevel, until the panel goes all the way in.

With patience and lots of test fits as you work, you should be able to achieve a joint with no visible glue line on all four sides. Whenever I make a cabinet, I always build to allow movement with the seasons.

There is really no way to prevent seasonal movement of wood, even veneers will move. On most of my case pieces the carcase sets down into a separate dovetailed base frame and is rabbeted along the lower back edge to conceal movement. What this rabbet does is allow the carcase to expand over the top of the base frame. This base is attached to the carcase with screws from underneath. These screws pass through strips that are glued to the inside face of the base frame.

They are set into countersunk holes along the front edge and slotted holes with flat washers at the sides and back. I also fit glue blocks on the bottom side of the strips, between the screws, to add some strength.

By fastening the base frame this way, all movement is focused at the back where it does not show. Trim is also attached to allow movement. I fix the side pieces to the carcase with a segmented sliding dovetail. The reason for the segments is the dovetails are attached to the carcase with screws at a cross grain location. By making the dovetails in segments even the concealed joinery is allowed to move.

Use a Stanley 79 a side rabbet plane to angle the sides of the groove to create the female side of a sliding dovetail. To make the male side, plane off the sides of a small stick to match the angle of the dovetail. It should be as long as the cabinet. When this stick slides evenly into the groove you are ready to mount it on the cabinet.

During the dry fit stage leave the stick in one piece. Mount it to the cabinet with 8 screws.

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