Dovetail Tablesaw Blade

[Howard gorm]

Thanks everyone for your comments and suggestions

[Jacques Gagnon]

Edwin,

Interesting comments and beautiful craftsmanship.

Regards,

J.

[Bob Riefer]

I'm in the process of building 5 dining chairs right now, with each chair featuring a single large dovetail on both sides of the connecting piece that joins the front legs to the rear legs.

I used a delta tenon jig to hold the connecting pieces on end while I cut the sides of the tails consistently by setting the table saw blade at the preferred angle. Then, using the table saw sled (and blade back to 90 degrees) I made the shoulder cut. Almost zero cleanup needed afterwards.

For the sockets in the front / back legs, I returned to the table saw with the blade at the same preferred angle. Using some stops to ensure cut placement, I nibbled away. Flipped the piece the other way to finish nibbling from the other side.

Since I was using a regular combo blade (ridge carbide) the bottoms of my sockets were ridged a bit. I just ensured that depth of cut was such that I could clean up with a sharp chisel after. A blade meant for this task would be better I'm sure, but this wasn't bad at all.

I ended up cutting 20 tails and 20 sockets in about 1.5 hours. The time spend felt reasonable to me, and the results were very consistent.

[Tom Bussey]

I looked at Edwin's picture of his dovetails and thought his post was off target from the original post because it doesn't look like one could get a table saw blade through the opening for the pins. To me they appear to be hand cut. Then I read his post and I agree with everything he had to say and what he wrote is well written.

I cut a lot of dovetails on my table saw. Enough in fact to have made 3 sleds. One for the pins and two for the tails. I cut all the angles at 10 degrees. A 1 to 6 ratio comes out to be around 9 1/2 degrees. I use a full 1/8 blade and remove the waist with a 1/8 wide band saw blade. To me I do not feel it is worth over a hundred dollars to get a special ground blade just to take care of a 1/8 inch tringle at 10 degrees. I would also have to change out the blade to cut the pins. A 1/8 rip blade works for both. My rip blade is a Freud 24 tooth blade with a flat top. which is great for pins.

In the picture below both the tails and the pins were cut on the table saw. The waist was removed on the tails with the band saw the waist on the pins was also removed a cut at a time on the table saw. A piece on the ends was glued back on so they it appear to be half blind.

If you are doing a batch of drawer, of which I have 20 coming up, the band saw with a sharp blade can do a wonderful job if cleaning up the small triangle because the are drawers and will be closed most of the time anyway a small overcut will not be noticed.

But personally today I do a 3/8ths finger jointed drawer. I put on my Dato blades, put on the sled, set the blade height and cut.

So, personally I do not feel it is worth well over $100 dollars to buy a specialty blade to do one operation that can be accomplish in 30 seconds with a chisel. But I would use the money saved to buy a fish tail chisel from LN to make the small chisel work easier and because it can be use in more applications .

[Richard Hutchings]

But personally today I do a 3/8ths finger jointed drawer. I put on my Dato blades, put on the sled, set the blade height and cut.

So, personally I do not feel it is worth well over $100 dollars to buy a specialty blade to do one operation that can be accomplish in 30 seconds with a chisel. But I would use the money saved to buy a fish tail chisel from LN to make the small chisel work easier and because it can be use in more applications .

I need to try your method of drawer building with finger joints. Next time I build a drawer.