need some dovetail advice

[Jerry Nettrour]

I have no dovetail experience. I have woodworked for a very long time. I build kitchens and wall units/built ins for a living. I always provide drawers built with rabbit joints. I found a good source for dovetail drawer boxes who even provided me with sample boxes to show my customers. I sold my current customer on dovetail drawer boxes, about 25 boxes. I am at the end of the job, finish out is near complete and when I went to place my drawer box order the source had went out of business. Now I need to learn to dovetail on the fly.

1. Which jig gives me the most bang for the buck, not necessarily the cheapest but rather the best and easiest to use. I watched a lot of youtube video on the leigh super jig and it appears rather simple and good quality. What about the porter cable jig??? Any other suggestions. Woodriver??? I need to be able to set up and cut several pins, several tails as in production.

2. Is it feasible for me to use a tight baltic birch plywood in a leigh jig or will that be a waste of time. Any experience I have had in the past with using a router on plywood was that the plywood just splintered. The source I did have provided me with 2 sample boxes, one was solid maple and the other was 1/2" baltic birch. Both boxes were very high quality and looked superb so I know dovetailing baltic birch ply is feasible.

3. Any other options out there anyone knows of just let me know.

Thanks and happy woodworking,

Jerry

[Frank Drew]

Jerry,

For furniture I prefer hand cut dovetails out of solid, but for things like better quality built-ins and cabinetry, I think dovetailed baltic birch (usually 1/2") makes a good looking joint and it's a lot stronger than a simple rabbet. I've used one of those simple Porter Cable jigs; you can eliminate some of the tear out by climb cutting where possible, but there will still be some pieces flying off from the inside faces of the tails. Luckily, those parts will be hidden once the joints are glued and assembled.

[Joe Scharle]

I've got a Super jig you mentioned and 3-4 others and I think it's probably your best choice with your time constraints. Excellent included manual & videos are on the net as well, allow for a very quick learning curve. I'd would use solid wood although I've cut some drawers with BB (or what was sold as BB!) My problem with ply has been blowout on the cut exit, which is the show side. Backer boards help, but for me, the time used in setting the backer boards is not worth any (?) savings in material.

That said, I just googled 'drawers' and a whole bunch popped up. Didn't check cost, but would bet $$ they aren't cheap!

If you do get a super jig, get the VRS. Not only collects the chips but adds support for the router.

[Jeff Monson]

Jerry,

I have made alot of 1/2 blind dovetail drawers for furniture and for kitchens, 1/2" baltic birch works fine you just need to learn how to avoid tearout, once you have a good procedure and a properly setup jig they are very quick to make. The birch dovetails look really nice and you have no movement to deal with.

As far as jigs go, I started with a pc 4212 it is easy to setup and works really good for the money, I upgraded to a omnijig so I could cut through dovetails, its a nice machine but is expensive and takes alot of setup IMO.

As far as it stands now, if I had a bunch of 1/2" kitchen drawers to make with 1/2 blinds I would stick to a simple jig like the 4212. If I had to make some through dovetails or 1/2 blinds for some fine furniture I would learn to cut them by hand.

[Brad Wood]

i don't think any of the jigs are "easy" when you first pull them out of the box... but once you understand the concept of how they work, it is pretty straight forward.
I don't consider myself to be an ignoramus, but when you read the directions in your living room, I think it was the Greek version :)
You really need to read through the instructions, step by step, with wood in hand and the jig in front of you.. then it is pretty easy

[Jim Koepke]

I have only used one set up and most likely the cheapest.

One thing to consider is to make a few practice runs first to get the set up tolerances set correctly before starting production.

You may also want to look into the cost of pre-made drawer boxes compared to how much it is going to take you to get set up and going.

I know there are some lumber supply companies that have precut drawer material. You may want to check what is available before you commit a lot of time on this project.

jim

[David Keller NC]

Jerry - Since you're asking about jigs for routers, you may want to move this question to the General Woodworking and Powertools section of the forum. There are consistently 4 times as many people viewing it, and you may get a few replies from professionals that do what you're doing - making high-end cabinetry.

One option you haven't mentioned and I'll make you aware of is cutting these out on a bandsaw. You do need to make one jig out of ply for the pin portion of the joint, but that's it. Setup is minimal, and the learning curve is short. You also don't have tear-out to worry about, though this method will be a bit slower than a router (though still way faster than a backsaw and a chisel).

If you've a sub to the FWW site, there's an article on doing this:

https://www.taunton.com/finewoodworking/ProjectsAndDesign/ProjectsAndDesignPDF.aspx?id=2103

[Andy Bardowell]

Jerry you didn't say how much you carried in your price for your supplier if it's anywhere around $500-600 then the Leigh D4R is considered by many to be the Cadillac of dovetail jigs. See if you can contact the guy you were outsourcing the work to, perhaps he’s selling off his equipment.

[Jerry Nettrour]

Thanks for all the advice. I still lean towards a nice jig. I would much prefer to outsource. I average a kitchen every 4 to 6 weeks, no huge production line but that ends up being around 20 or so drawers per month that I end up doing. Adding dovetail just enhances our cabinets. I preferred baltic birch because it is going to be much flatter to work with and still looks really nice. I seem to be leaning towards leigh and akeda jigs. Don't mind putting some money into it because of how many drawers I will average. This one job alone I was going to pay my source $700 for 25 drawers dovetailed before they ended up closing their doors. So if I apply the $700 towards a good jig and the rest towards baltic ply and 1/4" ply for bottoms I may have the initial pain of setting up but should be golden from here on.

I prefer a set up that I can leave set up and just run a production style run 1 time per month. I have thought about the 24" leigh because I assume I can set one side for pins and the other side for tails and go like bonkers with two separate inexpensive hand held routers. Of course with the leigh I may only need the 12" because the pins and tails are always set, you just need to flip the template when going from pins to tails.

Also, just a thought, but to minimize blow out on the baltic, could I just use gray/duct tape on the birch to minimize the blow out, course the tape glue may be hard on the bit. I read someone mentioned blue mask tape but I would think that to be too soft.

Any other thoughts, I appreciate them all.

[Jerry Nettrour]

The fella that went out of business, I was told the money partner closed the doors and sold his equipment. I assume they were pretty big dealers, my lumber yard told me those guys were spending 15000.00 per month with them. I don't think their boxes were on any of these small portable jigs, I assume they were using some huge $10,000 grizzly dovetail machine.

I placed this in the general woodworking and power tools but it got moved. Either way, I don't much care where the thread is, I just want advice and any help is appreciated.

On one other quick note, I am excited as I just got a call this evening from a local kitchen showroom who wants to partner and display some of my custom cabinets. They said they currently feature Cardell cabinets and Quality cabinets but stated they want a local custom guy to handle all their customers requesting true customized cabinets. I hope it pans out. It may be like the singer finding a promoter/record label. Who knows???

[Charles Robertson]

Akeda 24". Check out the web site.

[David Keller NC]

"Also, just a thought, but to minimize blow out on the baltic, could I just use gray/duct tape on the birch to minimize the blow out, course the tape glue may be hard on the bit. I read someone mentioned blue mask tape but I would think that to be too soft."

I would try the blue painter's tape first - I've used duct tape before to prevent blow-out on a table saw and a router, but in my experience it tends to pull into the cutters rather than cut cleanly - not always, but when it does pull off of the work and into the cutter head it makes a collosal mess.

[Richard Dooling]

Have you given any thought to using sliding dovetails? This is what I used for years to attach fronts to sides. We used a dado capture the backs in the sides. Plenty strong and very fast.

Of course this leaves you with a lip on the drawer and I don’t know what your design parameters are and it doesn't have the status of regular dovetails.

.

[Jerry Nettrour]

Thanks for the advice. I geuss now I just need to make the decision. I am torn between swinging for the fence with an akeda 24" and the PC 4210. The akeda for ease of use, small learning curve, minimal setup time, I like that there is a solid foundation for the router to sit on. Seems to be a really good system but pricey. The 4210 would also get the job done and provide us with nice looking HB dovetails which is really what I am after, and it would do it at a fraction of the cost.

One thing to consider is, to be honest, my wife likely will be the one cutting the dovetails and she is about 95 lbs (I work full time with the state and she and I run this cabinet business on the side pumping out a few awesome kitchens here and there). The akeda seems to be a better fit for her since she would not have to use a lot of arm strength to balance the router on the jig.