My first attempt at Hand-Cut Half-Blind Dovetails...

[Harold Burrell]

Not perfect, but...

(You will notice the groove that is visible for the drawer bottom. Yes...I cut that with an electric router. I am truly sorry. Please forgive me.:o)300236

[Prashun Patel]

Keep on truckin'. Not bad. Keep posting. I like seeing how people progress. I tend to tuck my groove into the bottom tail. That way I don't have to do any stopped dados.

[Chris Hachet]

Having repaired about a jillion pieces of antique furniture, most period pieces are not much better. I have a 1740 Queen Anne Lowboy in my master bedroom with sloppier dovetails.... rest of the piece is fantastic but....

[Daniel Rode]

Looks like a good start to me!

A few months ago I needed to make a pair of drawers. I practiced nightly for a couple weeks. I did one joint per night until I was comfortable with my results. The bonus was that I could experiment with the pin/tail layout and the web thickness at the same time.

[Brian Holcombe]

Looks nice Harold. When you waste out the sockets cut 1/16" ahead of the line when you are doing your initial chopping. Then cut the line. Reason being is that the chisel will wedge itself toward the line when you are chopping, so if you start on the line it will always be too deep.

[ken hatch]

Not perfect, but...

(You will notice the groove that is visible for the drawer bottom. Yes...I cut that with an electric router. I am truly sorry. Please forgive me.:o)

Harold,

Shame on you :-). I'm sure no one else on this forum would think of such a thing.

One of the reasons to do half-blind dovetails is to hide the bottom groove. Plan the groove so it runs through a tail, if space is a problem, one way is to put a half tail on the bottom with the groove through it.

ken

[David Weaver]

I agree, good start. You can make most of that disappear with glue.

[Mike Henderson]

Good start. For cutting the groove, do your dovetails first, then assemble the four sides of the drawer, use tape to hold the joints together if you need to. Then set up a slot cutter bit on your router table - use the correct size slot cutter and raise it to where you want the slot. Then put your four board drawer on your router table with the slot cutter inside and use it to cut the groove along the inside of the four sides. This will insure that the groove is lined up where two boards meet. If you cut the grooves first, and wind up offsetting one board just a small amount when you do the dovetails, the grooves will not line up.

This also has the advantage of not showing on the outside since you never cut the groove all the way to the end of the boards.

This will leave a rounded end to the groove at each corner so you'll have to clean that up a chisel. That way, you can say the grooves were partially "hand done".:)

Mike

[If you don't have the correct size slot cutter, you can make two passes, just raise (or lower) the slot cutter the proper amount to make the groove the proper size.]

[Judson Green]

Looks good and like david said some glue will fill up the gaps ez

[Adam Cruea]

They look just fine to me, especially being done in what looks like pine.

Keep on truckin', man. And try some oak or maple; they'll look even better, I'm sure. :cool:

[Jim Koepke]

Looks better than my first try at hand cut half blind dovetails.

jtk