Basics of Joinery — Three Joints

Course Introduction

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Using a Hand Saw

Hi, my name is Frank Strazza with the Heritage School of Woodworking. And in this video, I'm going to go over proper sawing technique and some different exercises that I have my students do to prepare for hand cutting dovetails. Sawing is one of those things that is probably one of the harder skills to learn in woodworking. And once you learn how to saw accurately, it will really affect the quality of your joints. Now, there's different saws that you can use for cutting dovetails. There's a straight handle one like this one. This is a dovetail saw that I picked up on eBay. I got this one for $9.99. And I was the only bidder I did sharpen it though. It didn't come sharp. So you've got to watch our sharpening videos. If you do pick up your saw for $9.99. This is a Lie-Nielsen one, which is a pistol grip handle, which is a little different. And some may prefer this one as opposed to a straight handle. I've used the straight handle one for-- oh I don't know-- 20 plus years in cutting dovetails. And I like it. I'm comfortable with it. But if I was to recommend a saw for cutting dovetails, I would highly recommend this saw. It comes sharp. It's ready to go out of the box. It's Lie-Nielsen dovetail saw-- a very, very nice saw. Let's talk about technique, proper hold of the saw, how to position your body. For this exercise, I've just chosen a piece of pine here. And we'll stick it in our face vice. And I'm not even going to draw any lines right now. I just want to focus on proper technique, how to hold the saw. So let's start with this straight handled saw. So what I'm going to do is position the saw in the palm of my hand like this, gently wrap my fingers around like this, with my first finger pointed to the side. My thumb is on the top. And I'm going to position my body with my front left foot forward. I'm right handed. So I've got my left food forward and my right foot back. The advantage to this is that I can bend at my needs. A lot of people complain when their sawing that they are hunched over the bench. Well, a lot of that is technique. If you're standing with two legs like this, you only have one choice but to bend at the back. And that can be uncomfortable. Proper stance can save your back. So position your right foot back, left foot forward, or reversed if you're left handed. Bend at the knees like this. Position yourself back far enough so that you can see what you're doing. And it also extends your hand, your arm in the right position. You'll notice that my arm is in line with the saw. What I don't want is I don't want pressure going straight down on top of the saw, which is easy to do if you're in the wrong standing position. So if I'm standing over like this, and I'm holding the saw like this, automatically it puts pressure going straight down as opposed to back here like this. Now, it positions the thrust in a linear motion, which is what we want. We want this linear back and forth motion. We don't want downward pressure. We want a linear stroke. So first finger like this in the palm because I want to be able to push it like this-- first finger like that. I'm going to position my thumb here against the saw blade. What happens here is I'm positioning-- my first finger is pointing forward like this. But it's also putting pressure to the side of the saw. It's pressure this way. But then I have to counteract that pressure with my thumb. So here comes the thumb counteracting the pressure. And now I have a rigid hard line that I can saw accurately to. OK. So I put my thumb not here on the top, but here on the edge, on my work piece. I position my first finger, pushing the saw up against my thumb. And lightly, you can see I can even start like this at an angle, and then the lower the saw into it just like this. Now one thing that I often tell my students is you want to use the whole saw and then some. Because what I find is a lot of people will tend to use this much of the saw. And I threaten to just cut the saw off like that, and then have a little tiny short saw. The problem with that though is if you do that, it tends to not give you a rhythmic stroke. You'll tend to have a choppy kind of stroke and you'll be fighting the saw. By using the whole saw, you get more of a rhythm to it, and thus you'll have more smooth cut. So you'll notice here, what I'm doing here, is I'm just pushing the saw with my palm. Look at that see. Just pushing the saw with my palm, dragging it back like that. What I find a lot of people do is they'll try to start the cut, and then it's not working, so they'll put more pressure on the top like this. And therefore, this thing isn't cutting at all so we got to apply more pressure. More pressure. More pressure. And then, it cuts in like that. I don't want to do that. I have no control that way. It's not effective one bit. I can't follow a line that way. It doesn't work. What you have to do, if the saw is not cutting, is lighten up. Actually, you can even use your middle finger to lift the saw up out of the cut, and light pressure. I often refer to this as the teeth dancing across the top of the surface, as opposed to digging into the surface. I want to show you the hold for using the pistol grip style handle here. Basically, you want to put your hand in there, which it fits very comfortably in this handle-- very nicely made handle. It does cost a little bit more than $9.99, but it's well worth it. What I'm doing here is the same thing. I'm positioning this finger out here that points the saw in a straight direction, but it also puts pressure to the side like this against my thumb like this. Again, the same exact technique. Lift up the saw. If the saw is not cutting, I'm going to lift up. Lift up on the saw. And then work it straight down like this. One little technique that I like to use for sawing is to make a series of cuts, just straight cuts. So let's show you. We're going to make a cut here like this, then I'm going to come back and try to make as fine a cut as I can that runs parallel to that cut without cutting through. So you can see we have a little tiny cut there. And we'll make another one. So what this is controlling, or what this is teaching is control of the saw. So I'm trying to get it both square on the top and parallel straight down like this. Now granted you won't be able to do this your first time sawing. What you want to do is you want to start a cut here. Again, light pressure, then move over a little bit. And see if you can follow that line. Make a nice parallel cut. Maybe you can master the technique to cut these little curves, chances are your dovetails will turn out tight. Those are different techniques. One thing I want to talk about again here with you using the saw is these are Western style saws. Western style saws cut on the push stroke. The advantage here is that all my fuzz, if you will, the little fuzz that comes from cutting is on the outside. It's on this part here. So it's not fuzzing up my line. The Asian style saws, Japanese saws and such, actually cut on the pull stroke. And a lot of people like to use those saws a lot of times because their sharp and ready to go out of the box. Although, they're difficult to resharpen. The technique though is essentially the same in that you want a linear stroke. If I took this saw, Western saw, and I turned it around like this, it cuts very easily. Why is that? Well, it's because I'm simply dragging the saw through the wood just as I would if this was a Japanese style saw. You see how easy it cuts? But it can cut that easy going this way, if we apply the same technique of a linear motion. A linear motion like that, it cuts just fine. One thing that I like to do for an exercise for hand cutting dovetails is to draw some lines on here to prepare ourselves for following a line. So we're going to start by marking square across the top. Now this, surprisingly, is the most important cut for cutting a dovetail, following the line, and getting it perfectly square across the top. I'm going to go ahead and make some lines on the face that I'm looking at here, carrying those line straight down. So now I have a line square across the top and then straight down on my side. And I always want to stay to one side of the line. So I'm going to start here, and just come in like this, and again very lightly here, follow the line. Now, one thing that I'm doing that you may not be able to pick up here is I'm making a subtle change with my wrist. So as I'm following down, I'll be putting pressure with my wrist to one side or the other side like this as I go down to make sure that I follow the line perfectly. Now, if I was putting a lot of pressure going down, I wouldn't be able to make those subtle changes with my wrist as I followed down. So again the following just to one side here, light pressure, lift up on the saw. Let the saw do the work. Now we're going to just follow it down, leaving the line. Here, I'm making a slight rotation with my wrist, working down like that. So this is a good exercise to start off with. The next exercise-- actually works quite well-- is where we'll use our dovetail template marker. So I've got a dovetail template marker, which you'll see I'll use when we hand cut our dovetails. And it's one that I made. We'll have a video on making this little tool here. Simple tool, but it's got a one in seven angle. The advantage with this tool is that I can mark both the top and the angles simultaneously. So all I'm doing here is I'm just making some marks for you to practice following that line. And then we'll come back and we'll mark this side. So now I can just follow that angle. This is really good warm up practice. Just trying to follow that line. What I've found is that a lot of people will be able to follow the angle going in one direction, but then when they come back this way it's a little bit harder. So you just have to compensate, if you tend to be going in with a steeper angle. If I tend to be going too steep in one direction, then just steer the saw back. Again, that's the advantage of going slow at it. Just light pressure. Steer the saw. I've often seen people make a mark on both sides. And I don't recommend that, because I'm only looking at one side when I'm sawing. So as long as your saw is following straight here, then there's really no need to have a mark on the other side. Very important again that you are square across the top. So you'll notice I'll even start the saw square this way. I'll even check it sometimes with a square. Put the square up against it. Don't run it back and forth. Just check it. Then, I'll angle the saw back like this and continue the cut. If you can master your saw, chances are your dovetails, your tenons, and such, will turn out almost perfect. So go to the practice board. Make yourself some practice cuts. And master your saw.

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Cutting the Dado Joint

I'd like to start with the dado on the two sides. The reason for that is if you are a little loose on these dados, it's not as critical as if you were loose on the top and the bottom. So in other words, it gives you a little couple extra practice pieces prior to doing the top and the bottom dados. Let's begin. I'm considering the back of the side here, the back of the shelf as my reference point. And this is going to be my face. I'm going to put the knife straight in here, slide it up. All of this is covered in our three joint series where we talk about hand cutting the dado joint. You'll want to watch that prior to doing this, as we cover a lot of the techniques and stuff. You'll notice that I am using a little different technique here in this paring method, which I actually like to use. You may feel more comfortable coming in like this. But I like to slide it along. It works fairly effectively. Once we've established our wall there, we can come back now with the chisel and the mallet and hit straight down like this. You can then come in with your mallet and cut in like this. So you can see how fast can actually cut one of these, working in this fashion. So there we have it. We're down to our depth right there. We can come in with our the shelf and position it just like this. Angle the knife. Put a little mark right there. And if you're up to working like this, you just take it around. As opposed to moving this board, flipping it around, you could work it like this. Lightly at first, and then heavier with the stroke. Again, you can come in shearing it across the grain. Now, well, the trick here is to keep the edge of the chisel away from the wall there so you don't damage the wall. Come back with a knife, angling it. It will follow right in that same cut. Again, if you're comfortable, you can just switch hands and work back this way. Course, if you're not comfortable doing it this way, you might be more comfortable just taking the whole piece, flipping it around on the vice like this. Angle the knife-- very important to angle the knife. That will keep the wall straight. So I say angle knife. I'm not angling the wall. I'm just angling the knife, because it's a double bevel knife. And I'm trying to get that wall straight. Come back with the chisel like this. Follow along that knife wall, just like so. Follow it along. And then we come back even like this and remove that material like that. We'll make one more pass like this lightly. And now, we can pare away the waste in here, like this. As I mentioned in the previous video, I'm cutting a stop dado. It's easy to go too deep like this. And the reason why, oftentimes is because one might have a shorter chisel, and it rides up on this beveled part. And it's easy to cut in like this. So you've got to watch for that. Make sure you don't go too deep. If you need to on a longer dado, you can even turn the chisel around, and come at it, like this. Now, I'm going to clean this part up. Just make a few cuts right up to it. And we'll come on the side, like this. Hang that up. And then I'm going to clean it up with a router plane. So we'll set the router plane right to my depth, which I've already cut to the depth right at this end. Because I've got the layout line over here on this side. And then we can bring this in and bring a nice, even depth all the way across. I'm just going to take the knife and just clean up right there. And right there, making sure that it's nice and crisp there. Let's just check it. Again now, if it's a little bit tight like this one is, there's a couple ways to deal with it. One thing that I look at if it's too tight is I look at the walls to make sure that the walls are running perfectly straight. If they're actually canted in-- and a lot of times, this will happen, where you start out here, then they'll come in like this. The first thing that I would want to do is I'd want to come back with a chisel and clean that up. What it looks like I've done here with this one is it's a little bit on the tight side is I just under cut it a little bit too much with my knife. So there's a couple things I could do. I could even go back and score this again, or I could just hand plane the end of this right here. I've put a little knife mark there. I'll show you how you can clean this up. Just take the knife right in there and slide this up to it. And score this lightly, angling the knife. Now, what I have is I've got a miniature knife wall here that we can just set the chisel. The chisel should fall right in there. And we go straight in, just like this. And there we go. So that concludes the first side. The second side will be done in exactly the same manner. Well, I'm just finishing up the second dado on the side here. And we'll just test fit it. And it fits nicely. So now, we can move on to the dado on the top and the bottom. Let's start with the top one. Again, the bottom one is probably the most critical one that's tight. So let's start with the top one here. Again, this is giving us lots of exercise and practice at getting our dados nice and tight. Now, one of the things that you want to keep in mind here when working on the dados here is that we've got this part here, which can be weak. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually start on both of these dados. I'm going to start on the inside. And we're going to cut that first. Thus, relieving some of that wood. Then we come over here, there's less chance of breaking this out. We still have to be careful of this so that we don't break that out. Well, let's start on the inside, right there. So I'll start by marking. Remember to keep the knife on the good side. Rather, the knife on the away side and the square on the good side. Lightly-- now, what I like to do is I like to just bring the square around, like this, and mark both of these. So whatever cut I do on one, I'm going to do that exact same cut on the other. It just cuts down on wasted motion. Now, we can work it. Again, I like to bring this chisel along, slicing it along the grain. And this technique works in hardwood, in soft wood. It does require a little bit of practice. Notice that the tip of it is away from the edge. And I'm shearing it along. This is jumping a little bit because of the grain. But we've got that. And we'll come back here. And you'll also notice here a little technique I'm using. When I'm cutting with a knife, I'm actually supporting the tip, rather the end of the knife with my thumb. And then my fingers are braced on the bench. And that just adds an extra point of stability as I'm working along here. Now, back in with the chisel, just like this. And again, you can use this technique as well, where you just come straight in, just like this. Comes straight in, just like that. Remove that material. Then come back again. See? See how I'm supporting this with my, my finger out here. And we've got a nice, established wall here. Here, we can come back with a chisel, keeping it flat up against the side. Switch sides, and come right over here. And cut this one, as well. Then we'll come in here, like this. And the same way, over here. You notice what I'm doing here is I'm using an overhand. So I've got the mallet over, like this. Still, my fingers are low. So I'm supporting the chisel. Remove that material. You can again, come back with a knife and work it like this. Now, I'm going to transfer the shelf to mark each individual dado. I want to make sure that I get the correct shelf for the right size. Because what we're doing is we're not using a measuring tape here. We're using the actual thickness of the side to match this dado. So this dado is going to fit right inside. This shelf, rather is going to fit right inside this dado. So let's make sure we get the right one. We're working on the top. This is the left one. So this goes right up right in here, just like so. And again, make sure it's not angled over too far-- as straight as you can. And angle the knife so that it just goes in, just like this. Angle the knife. We'll get the other one and fit it right over here. And angle the knife just like this. And now, we have both of these marked. Now, marking these with a square a little tricky, because we've got our square, like this. And if I position my square on this side, then I've lost my point of reference here. Because this is my point of reference here. And I'm assuming then that this would be perfectly parallel with this edge. And I really want to work off of the continuous edge. In this case, I want to work off of this back edge. If I hold the square like this, there's no point that I can actually position it on. So that's not going to work, as well. And I don't want to put it like this, because then the knife is going to be on the good side and the square on the waste side. And it's not going to be accurate. So I really have to position. This is really the only way that I can position it. But I've got to watch doing this, because the square may want to move. And I don't want to really drag the knife into the square like this. So what I have to do is I have to hold the square like this, put the knife in there. Hold it in there, and very lightly score it. Again, I can't stress enough how important it is that you hold this square. Tie it up against there, and press very lightly, initially. Once you have that marked and you've marked over it a few times, you can move the square out of the way, and then come back and mark it heavier. Now I'll mark the other side here. Again, I'm going to hold it like this, put the knife in there. And again, this is a little awkward. But you just have to make sure that you press the square up against the edge here and hold the knife. And press very lightly with the knife. If I pressed hard with the knife, there would be a tendency that I could move the square. And then we wouldn't really mess it up. So this is probably the most vulnerable part of the dado, right here. Because it's so close to this outside edge. So I've got to be careful. If you're going to use this method, just be careful that you don't press too hard and then end up breaking something off. So we're going to come in like that. Got to switch hands, like this. We'll come back with a knife one more time and mark this again. And again, like that. And again, I can use this same technique here, where I slice it along. And this will minimize any pressure going in that direction. Of course, if you're not comfortable with this method, I wouldn't necessarily recommend you doing it, because you could also tear up that edge, right there. Now, I've got an established wall. And if I was to go straight in with the chisel, like this, and hit this down, again, the chisel's acting like a wedge. And it may want to push the material out on this side. It's also pushing to that side, as well. And I can do that. I can do it lightly. Just come in like this. But I've got to be very cautious. There is another technique that you can actually use for this. And that's actually using a saw. I can use the dovetail saw and cut along the side, right here. And cut down, right down to the line. Now, I can't cut all the way through. So I'm going to lower the saw. And you'll see, I'll be making short strokes, just like this. And the saw will dig in, right towards the edge, right there. And as long as we go down to the line, we should be fine. So that's one effective way really, to do any type of dado. This is actually, in fact, the exact method that I use when I'm doing a long dado. So if I'm making a long dado or something similar, I'll create the knife line in exactly the same way. I'll come along and create that little wall with the chisel in exactly the same way. That forms a nice channel for you to be able to put the saw in and work it. Even a shorter saw like this will work on a much wider piece. So we're going to work the saw down. Now, I'm working, putting pressure here, at this part, cutting in right down there. And then I can come back and even remove some of the waste with the chisel, just like this, very carefully. See how my palm is resting against the workpiece? Come in like this. I'm going to come back with a couple knife strokes, just to clean up-- especially right up in there, where the saw didn't really get right up in that area. Now, we'll come back with a half inch chisel and remove the waste. It's always important that you mark with a knife and cut those fibers going across the grain. Because if you don't, when I come back with a router plane, I could tear something, or it wouldn't cut all the way through. So make sure that you score the fibers going this way. And then we'll come back with the plane, like this. Now, when we fit these, we want to make sure that they're not too tight. Course, we don't want them too lose. But if they're too tight, that's another opportunity for this to blow out and break out. If it does break out, all you've got to do is simply put a little glue and a little masking tape, and clamp that down, and it'll be just fine. So just make sure it's not too tight. You can feel it. Wiggle it to the side. That's all a means to help. That's a little bit on the tight side. But that's fine. And that'll actually give me a little bit of leeway when I surface plane this. I can plane this, and it'll fit just right. And it's going in enough that I can know that it is going to go in all the way. This is exactly the same way. This actually fits very nicely. And it's tight in there. So that concludes cutting the dados for the top. The bottom are going to be done exactly in the same manner. I'm just finishing up the dado here on the bottom, just cleaning it up with a router plane. And then we'll fit it, make sure that it fits. Again, I want to make sure that everything is nice and crisp inside there. Can even come along with the one inch chisel, which is a broad chisel. And just make sure that that side is nice and crisp. One more pass with the router plane, and we should be ready to test fit it. Here we go. And then we'll take the top and fit it on, like this. And as I mentioned, the top is a little bit tight. And we can use an assembly mallot to tap it in place. But I don't want to tap it all the way in place for a fear that I might-- well, I can feel it. You can see it's starting to go down. That's actually going down very nice. And here we go. Now that we've got the six dados completed, the next step is to fit the shelf in between here. And as I mentioned earlier, I don't want to use a tape measure. If I use a tape measure, there's a chance that I could get the measurement off slightly, whereas if I put this piece directly up here and scribe fit it, it'll be much more accurate. Now, before I do that, I want to determine which is the front, which is the left, right of the shelf. I've got a little bit of a knot right there. And I know this piece is a little long. So I'm actually going to cut it off right over there on this side. So being that the knot's over there, we're going to make this as the front. So I'm going to mark shelf on here. And I'm going to mark this as left, and this as the right. So before I cut this end off, I want to make sure that this end is square. And it should be square. But we'll just check that. And it's good and square. If it wasn't square, you'd have to make sure that you cut it square or use a shooting board and a plane to shoot this nice and square. So we're going to fit this right inside here. Now, my goal here is to get inside this point and then to this point here. So I'll put this right inside here, just like this. And just put a little knife knick right there, up against the side. Just a little knife knick, right there. So again, this is right inside that point, and then right over there. Now But I've marked this, I'm just going to come here with a square and carry that line across the entire width of the board using the square and the knife. The next step is to remove this part, right there. It's not necessary. But I like to make a shoulder here prior to cutting it. And if you'll notice, I have this flat. I'm going to cut it like this. That way, if I was to saw it off on an angle, there's a lot less material that I'm going through, as opposed to standing it up right, like this, and sawing it down. Then I'd have to steer the saw perfectly straight as I traveled down the entire width of the board. Plus, I may run out of saw width using a-- well, if I used a saw like this, I'm obviously going to run out of the ability to be able to cut all the way through. So by putting it like this, I can cut straight in, just like that. Now, what you'll notice, I'm listening to the sound, as I get towards the end. This is the beauty of using a hand saw here, is that I can listen to that sound, slow the saw down as I through, and it breaks right off without tearing out the back side. Also, I've got that knife line on the backside. So that also helps keep it from tearing out. Now, one thing I want to point out here, that you'll notice that I've deviated from the line just slightly. Let's put a square on it. And that'll help us see that. If we put a square on it and held it up to the light, you can see that we've deviated from the line just a little bit. So how do we fix that? Well, this is where a shooting board comes in very handy. A shooting board can be something very simple. I've made one here that's a little bit complex. But you can use really anything that forms a 90 degree corner here. So I've got a 45 degree angle here and a 90 degree one. This fits in here, like this. You can use any plane that has a square edge. I like to use a low angle plane. Because a low angle plane tends to give me a shearing cut, which is what I want for cross grain cut. So you'll notice here, when I put this up here, you can see how far off I am. But a couple strokes, and you'll see how that pulls right up. See that gap right there? It's going to close up as I take material off on this side. Here we go. I'm pushing with this hand, pushing in this direction. And we're closing that up. And I'm going to right to my line right there. And there we go. We can put a square on it, and it should be perfectly square. Very nice. A shooting board is quite simple, as I mentioned. It's just basically a piece of wood down here with another piece of wood right on the top. The important part, though, is that we have a fence that's 90 degrees right here. The plane just simply rides on this part. And it only cuts into this piece of wood as much as the blade is sticking out. So there's a little recess there that's formed when the first few times that you run the plane on there. Very simple fixture to have in the shop. But absolutely essential, especially for jobs like this, squaring it up, and making it perfectly square. Now, let's go ahead and fit the shelf inside of our dados, right here. It should slide in. If your dados are tight, you may have to take the whole thing apart. But let's see if we can slide this in. Sometimes, I'll even take this and turn it down, like this, and then slide it in from the top, just like so. Now, I want to make sure before I go on to the next step that this is secure, tighten the dado this way. So if I hit it right there, it's obviously not going to work, because of this gap, right there. So what we're going to do is we're going to set this on the edge of the bench, making sure that it's flat on the bench right there. And we're going to pit it straight down, like this. That makes it good and tight this way. Nice and tight that way. Now, what we can do is we can come back with a knife. And we can mark either side. So we're going to mark right there, and we're going to mark right here. And what I'm doing is I'm marking for my actual step. Because this one is going to be a stepped dado. In other words, this is going to come all the way flush with the front. So I'm marking my step. Again, notice here, I'm angling the knife in like this-- important. You've got to compensate for that double bevel. So you've got to angle the knife in, like this. Once that's marked, I'll go ahead and knock this out. And you can do that by just simply putting it on the edge of the bench, like this, and then knocking this all the way through, just like that. Now that I've got that little mark right there, I've got to mark, how deep am I going to make this cut? Because what we're going to do is we're going to make a little notch right there. If you remember back to the video that we did on cutting a dado, we talk about cutting this stop and this little step. But what we're going to do is we're going to put this up here like this. And we'll take a pencil and mark this, right here. So I'm marking this distance, right here. And we have a little bit of leeway. So I'm not going to be super accurate here with this. This is going to be hidden inside there. I'm just making this as flush as I like. Nice and flush there, and putting a little mark, right there. We'll do the same thing on this side, as well. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this, put this in the vice, and use the knife and the square to carry those scribe lines across the face. So we're going to carry it across this way and then down this side. Now that I've got the knife line scribed here, I'm going to use the same technique that we've talked about in our earlier videos where we use that knife wall. We'll come in here, and we'll just make a little cut, just like this, right on the top. And then we'll use the saw and cut straight down, just like this. Now that I've cut down to my pencil line, which is facing me, I'm going to come in here and just chunk off the waste right down to the pencil line. We'll do the exact same thing on the other side here. We'll come in, making our little knife wall there. Then we'll saw it with the saw, right down to the pencil line. And then I'll chunk away the material, just like this. Stay above the line, and work it slowly down to the line. I'll have to come back and just clean up that last little bit, working down. Now, we can fit the shelf inside our dados. And this will complete this part. Make sure I have the left and right configuration. There's the shelf, left and right. We'll go ahead and push this down. And it should fit nicely. And now we have it. It's nice and flush with the front, and no gap there. So that completes the dados and the fitting of the shelf. Now we've got to mark for the mortise and tenons.

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Cutting a Stopped Dado

[MUSIC PLAYING] In this video, I want to show you how to do a stopped dado. In the past video, I showed you how to do a through dado. And we talked about variations on dado joints. So in this video, we're going to do a stopped dado, which is essentially laid out in the same way as a through dado. We're going to start out by positioning the piece here, marking the two outside parts there. I've got my face mark and my edge mark. And we're going to take the square and carry these lines. Now being that it's going to be stopped, we're going to not draw the lines all the way up to the face. I'm just going to take the thickness of this stock and just position it here and mark the front. So I'm just stopping it the thickness of this stock from the front edge. Again, we'll just carry our lines down like this. Again that's just going to define the depth there. So I'm assuming you have already watched the first dado on the through dado. If you haven't, you need to watch that to catch some of the more detailed elements of the technique on how to do this. Next, we're going to set the gauge to a quarter of an inch in the depth. And it's set from the previous dado. We're just going to position our little mark there and slide it up. And it stops in. For some, you may want to mark it with a pencil just so you can see it. So the main difference here is we're not going to have a mark on both sides like we had on the previous dado. So we just have it on this side. And it stops right there. If you're making multiple cuts, you can actually reset the gauge. In this case, I used the thickness of this stock here. So we can reset it to the thickness of this stock and scribe it right here. That will just give you a repetitive mark from the face right here. Positioning this right here in the vice, we'll begin by making our knife wall. Take your knife. Put it into the cut. I've got the square on the good side, the knife on the way side, and mark it lightly. And then come back and mark it a little bit heavier. I've got my thumb right here in the curve of the square, pushing it up against the fence. That's really important. You've got to make sure that the square is tight right there, or else it won't be square. OK. One little technique that you can use here, this is actually more of an advanced technique, but you can actually take the chisel and slice it along the side like this. And that cuts it nicely. OK. And then you can just flick away the material. Now it's also very easy to mess it up using that technique, so you may want to just go back to this technique like we did earlier, where I have the actual stop cut. Again, just flick away that material. I'm going to come back and mark this one more time like this, just one more time, making that knife wall just a little bit deeper so that we can come back with our chisel and strike straight down just like this, again making sure that that chisel is tight up against that wall, just like we did last time. So I can again, I can come in like. This now one of the key, the tricks rather, for doing this is to keep the actual edge of the chisel away from that wall. So I'm actually, I'd say maybe an eighth of an inch away from the wall. And then I'm letting the fibers break to that knife cut. OK. So let's check it. Let's see how deep we are. We are pretty close. We could probably go back one more time with the chisel with a stop cut here. There we go. Now we can come back, positioning this right up against there nice and tight. It's tight up against the side. Make sure it's not too far angled down like this. It's nice and tight up against the side. OK, so we're going to use the knife. The pencil is just a rough guideline. The knife gives us precision. So we're just going to put a little mark there. OK. I'm going to turn this around because I'm right handed. And working off of this front face, come in like this. Position the knife right here. Slide the square up to it. And just bring it right along lightly at first, then heavier. OK. Come back with our chisel just like so. Just take off a little bit. Come in like this. Now one word of caution here. If you'll notice, I always try to be cautious to keep the sharp edges away from me when I'm working, especially when you're using the chisel. You've got both hands behind the cutting edge. Never, ever, on any occasion, do you ever want to hold the work piece with your hand and then chisel towards your hand. Your chisel will slip that way. The other thing too, another safety precaution here, is when I do flick the material away, move the chisel away from your hand. I've seen people oftentimes get cut by just handling the tools, not necessarily even using the tools. OK. Now we're going to come in here and we are going to just make our stop cut, just strike straight down, watching that chisel. Make sure that it's nice and tight up against that cut. We'll come in like this. Flick away the material. And then you can come back, making a cut again, straight like this. Got A little bit of material there. And we're close to the line. Now we can go back to removing the line in exactly the same way that we did last time, where we came in with a 1/2 inch chisel. And I'm just using a 1/2 inch chisel, because this is 5/8 material. And I want a little bit of room on either side of that chisel. I don't want to use a 5/8 chisel, because the chisel will be rubbing on the walls. And it would be difficult. So I've already-- I'm just trying to remove that mountain peak. Now one thing that's easy to make a mistake on here is cutting too deep right down there. Because we don't have a point of reference other than how deep we've cut the wall right there on the side. I don't have any point of reference over here on the back. And it's also easy, especially if your chisel is maybe a little bit shorter, it's easy for the chisel to ride up on this part right here and cut deeper right over there. So you've got to keep that in mind. Just watch that. One technique that you can use is focus back here. So again, using the same technique as we showed you earlier in that past video, the first video on cutting a dado. Now if I come in here like this, just paring along, if I run out of room with the chisel, I can simply turn the chisel around and continue, especially if this was a wider piece. I would just take the chisel and work it along like that, either using a mallet and carrying it along like this, or paring it like this. So we've got to work right up in here. And what I'm going to do there is I'm just going to take the mallet. Instead of positioning the chisel right on the line as you saw in the video there on cutting a through dado, we talked about that if you position the chisel right on the line, what's going to happen? It's going to push back past that line. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to start right here and work up to the line, taking off a little bit of material that one time, just kind of nibbling away at that material, working up to that line, and then right up to it. So that's how you can work right up to the line. Come in the side and clean that up just like this. There we have it. I'm just going to come in there like that. And then we'll just use the router plane to come right across like this, loosen this up, set it, and again, it works just beautifully. I prefer the larger plane for most of the dados. Because you have the mass of the tool and it carries it through. There is just some dados that you'll have to use the smaller one on, because they're just too small for that router plane. Now if you look right in there, you can see I've got a little bit of material. I'm just going to come back with a knife, angling the knife, and just clean it up right there on the sides, right along the side right there. And then we can come back like this, slide it in. What's important here is you'll notice the walls are crisp. They're nice and square. They're crisp inside. The bottom is nice and flat. Make sure all the junk's out from there. And then we'll test it. And it should just go in nicely. If it's a little tight, you can sometimes use a rubber mallet. I don't like to use this mallet for hammering together my joints. And that's because it's wood. And if you just strike it, an errant blow will cause a damaged surface. So you want to use the rubber mallet like this. And use the rubber side of the head. And you tap it in like that. And now you can see we have a stopped dado. It stopped right there. You can also make it a stopped stepped dado. And that's pretty easy to do. All you would do is you just take this, make sure this is hammered in nice and tight, all there. And we'll just take our knife and mark a little mark right there, just a little mark right there. Now I'm making a stopped stepped dado. So we'll just take this out, position this right here like this, and put a little mark right there. OK. So now we've got our knife mark there, our pencil mark there, and we're going to remove this little bit of material right there. And we'll saw and chisel that away. OK. So now I'm going to use the same knife wall method. And this method is used primarily for cross grain cuts, for cutting across the fibers. So you can see the z are running this way. We're going to use the knife wall method for going across those fibers. It also makes a nice place to start. In this case, I've got a saw. I'm going to saw these fibers. So we're going to make that little cut in like this. We've got a little notch there. But then I need to make it a line going straight down. So let's do that with the chisel and the knife. I'm using the knife here to position the square. And then we'll just take this and mark it right there. OK. Now I'm going to cut this down, again cutting across the grain. And if you've never used a saw, you need to watch our video on sawing, which I go over the techniques on how to saw, how to hold the saw, how to position yourself, and so on. So assuming you've already watched that video, you how to saw. We're going to cut straight down. Now I've got the line on this side so you guys can see this. Generally, I should have it facing me. Now I'm going to cut straight down to that cut. Now we can split the wood off using the mallet and the chisel. So you'll see, we'll just come in straight like that, right to my line. OK. I've sawn a little bit away from the line. So I'm going to come back with the chisel and just pare to it. Now I'm going to use a paring technique. You'll notice I've got my hand right here against the stock. I'm holding the chisel overhand and just coming at it, even slicing to the side like this. You see, just pared to that line. And now we've got that material removed. And we can test it. And now we have what we call a stopped stepped dado. And you can see there it's flush with the front. And you don't even see that there's a dado there. So that-- we'll actually use this exact same technique on our shelf making project. So that's the conclusion of a stopped stepped dado. [MUSIC PLAYING]

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A Dovetail Demonstration

Hi, my name is Frank Strazza with the Heritage School of Woodworking. And in this video, I'm going to show you the technique that I use in my every day working for hand cutting a dovetail. Now in our video on how to hand cut a dovetail, I'm going to show you some little different techniques. But in this one, I thought I'd just show you the method that I use for cutting a dovetail and how fast you can actually cut a dovetail using this technique. I'm going to start by actually marking the outside here because I like to do all of my work on the outside. I've got the outside face marked. With my face mark, I'm going to set my cutting gauge which does differ from a marking gauge, the main difference being that a cutting gauge actually has a knife blade in it. And that knife blade scores across the fibers. If you've watch the previous videos that we've done, we talk about the knife cut, scoring across the fibers. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to score with my cutting gauge on this board, all four sides here like this. And now I've got what I call my base line there. And I'm going to do the same thing on this one, just on the two sides. I don't have to do it on the ends because this one is the pin board. I'm going to cut the tails on here. Now I'm going to just cut these by eye. Of course, it determines how much the customer is paying, which will determine how much time I spend laying out the dovetails. But you can actually do a fairly accurate joint totally by eye. So we started by cutting the two outside pieces. I'm going to eyeball the center, and move over a little bit and cut the angles just like this. So it looks like I've probably got the spacing off maybe a little bit. But now we're going to come in here with a coping saw and just cut a little bit above the line. This is key here-- just a little bit above the line. And cope out the waste. Come in here, we'll cut the outside ends off. If anybody has ever told you that hand cutting dovetails is slow and laborious, you can tell them otherwise. This is actually faster than cutting it with a machine. Of course if you had multiples to cut with the machine, it might be worth the hour or two that it takes to set up a machine. But as you can see here, I'm halfway done with the joint, or almost halfway done. And most people have barely found their extension cord, let alone the router that it takes. What I'm going to do here is just take my chisel right, and it falls right inside that line. And we're going to trim right to the baseline. Again, this is the exact technique that I use for cutting dovetails on my furniture. Of course, I do spend a little bit more time laying out the angles and the spacing and such. Now there's the tails. This one's a little bit bigger, but that should not affect the tightness of the joint. What we're going to do here is we're going to put this on here just like so. And what's key here is to mark this with a sharp pencil, a very sharp pencil. So I look at the tip to make sure that no light is reflecting off of the tip. And if the pencil needs to be sharpened, I take a sharp chisel to sharpen the pencil. And that will give me a point that I can actually use which is very accurate. On hardwoods I'll actually use a knife, but pine is such that the knife tends to get lost in the fibers of the material. That's the waste part. We're just going to cut on the waste side of the line, straight down, all the way down, and following that line. And this is why you've got to learn how to saw to the line, follow the line and learn how to control the saw, very loose grip. Same thing here with the coping saw. You'll notice I'm holding it sort of like a golf grip. Of course, I've never golfed, but it seems like the way you're supposed to hold it. Two feet spread out, nice grip like this, and just bring it around, follow the line just like this, listening to the tone. As you get towards the end you'll hear the tone change. And right towards the end I slow the saw down and pop the cut out. Same way here, come around like this. I'm staying above the line, listen to the tone. There it is. There it is. And pop it out. And again, we're a little bit above the line, so we can just take our one-inch chisel and come in here. I can hardly see the line, but I can feel the line. Take it and drop it in there. And as long as I've cut about, a 16th or so above the line, there's no fear the chisel actually going past the line. If I'm too far above the line, I'll actually have to make this cut in two passes. So we're going to come back here, feeling that, and bring it in like this. There it is. You can hear it and feel it. And then I'm just going to come in just like so and just work it. I'm angling the cut, so that it's cutting to the inside like this. And again I do that to ensure that it's not hitting on the inside. There I'm just cleaning up the base there. I've got some torn fibers right there. And then the moment of truth. We'll take this, and it should fit on there. And sometimes it may need a little persuasion, better tight than loose. And that's how you cut a tight dovetail there, nice and tight. You can see it goes up along the baseline, tight on the inside, on the outside, and there on the edges. So I'm going to show you in the next videos how to cut a dovetail joint using some different techniques. Maybe a little bit slower, but we're going to slow down the process to where you can understand how and why these different techniques work.

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Cutting the Dovetail Joint

Hi. In this video, I'm going to go over how to hand cut a dovetail. We're going to do a single dovetail. And I'm going to kind of slow down the process and show you the different techniques that I use. These are some of the tools that you'll need. Not very many tools, a dovetail saw, a couple chisels-- I've got a 3/4-inch chisel, a 3/8 chisel-- a square, a knife, and a pencil, a mallet for striking the chisel. And you'll need a dovetail marker. But you can actually get away with using just a bevel square. And that's what I want to start out by talking about some of the different angles and how to come up with the angles. This is just a-- I call it a bevel square. It's actually called a sliding bevel. And it's used for getting differing angles. You can pick these up about anywhere. So let's begin by going over the angles. You may hear people refer to different angles in dovetails, such as a one in six, a one in seven, a one in eight. A one in six being a more steep angle. A one in eight being less steep. I generally use a one in seven or just do it by eye. But one in seven, I think, looks pleasing. And what that means is, essentially, I'm going to measure over one inch and measure down seven inches. So here we are. We're just going to take a ruler here on a piece of wood. And we're going to measure over one inch and then down seven inches and then join the two like this. Then we'll take our sliding bevel and hold that up there and bring it to the line right there. And there is the angle. That's a one in seven angle. So that's how we can determine the angle. Of course, I have a dovetail template marker. You can make your own. You can buy them. And it corresponds to the one in seven. So there we have it. I'll show you both methods. You can use the sliding bevel, if you prefer, or the dovetail template marker. Let's begin by doing some lay out. When I do a dovetail joint, I always like to put a general reference mark on the outside, that is a face mark on the outside that denotes the outside quickly so that I can have a reference point. And I can know this is the outside. That's the side that's going to be facing me when I'm cutting. So whenever I'm cutting a dovetail joint, I always want the outside facing me. Then I like to mark the corners. In this case, what I'm going to do, I use a letter or a number. Let's just put a letter A and A. And I like to put a little arrow pointing to the inside. And I'm doing that on the top edge. And, again, that's just denotes that these two go together. And this is really important when we make a box. And in our box-making video, you'll see why this is important. But you see we've got the letter A there. It's far enough back that I'm not going to inadvertently cut that letter off. And we also have the arrows pointing into the inside denoting that this is a corner. So let's start by marking our baseline. So we're going to take-- this is going to be a through dovetail-- we're going to take the thickness of this stock here. And we're going to position it right here like so. So I'm going to position it just like that. And I have a little bit of material on this bottom one sticking through, just a little bit. And then we'll just take and put-- feel it, a couple thousandths. I say a little bit, maybe a couple thousandths. You're just feeling with your fingertips. And put a little mark. Again, don't mark it all the way across. Just put a little mark there on the outside. Same way here, on the outside, the same thing. We're just going to take this, the thickness of this board, an put a little mark there. Now we're going to use the square and mark across the width of that board, just like so. So you see, again, if you've watched the previous videos, you know that the square must be held tight up against the edge there. And we'll just take that and mark it. That marks the baseline. There we have it. We've got the baseline right there. We'll pick one of these boards for our tails. For this exercise, I've chosen two pieces of wood, 5/8 of an inch by two inches by about eight to 10 inches long. And it makes a good little exercise here. So we're going to choose one of the boards here. And that's going to be our tail board. I'm going to start by creating the half pins. So I'm going to come in here 3/8 of an inch at the top from the edge and 3/8 here. I'd like to draw a little illustration here showing what this dovetail is going to look like in the end. The first part we're going to do here is we're going to cut the tail. So, basically, there's the tail. And we're going to cut the tail first. OK. So that's the tail. We'll add some three-dimension aspect to this here. So you can see that's what we're going to cut, just like so. So I'm going to lay it out from the top right up there and measure over 3/8 of an inch on either side. So that's the tail. It gets its name because it looks kind of like the tail of a dove. I'm going to begin by marking out the dovetail here. The first step is to measure over 3/8 of an inch on either side. That'll mark what I refer to as a half pin. And I'll use a chisel for-- I've got a 3/8 chisel. You could use a ruler. Resist the temptation, though, of marking all the way across. We're just going to put a little mark right there and a little mark right here. There are other methods for marking out a dovetail using dividers and such. I actually use dividers for marking out multiple dovetails. And you'll see that in future videos. So now we've got the 3/8 marked on either side. So there's two ways to mark this. We could simply put the dovetail marker right on here and mark square across the top and then mark the angle. And then, obviously, come over here and do the other side. If you don't have a dovetail template marker yet, you can use a square. So I put the square on there. And you notice I put the square on the broader side as opposed to here because there's no point of reference. And then I can use my one in seven bevel square. And I can put that right on there, sliding bevel, and mark that. So essentially the same thing. Of course, this makes it easier, if you put it on here just like so. And you mark both marks simultaneously. Now, what's important here is to mark the waste. That's the part we're going to remove. We're not removing this center part. We're leaving this part right here. So let's put an x on the part that we are removing, which is right there. And then we're going to come in and saw this. Now, the most important part about a dovetail is not so much the angle. If I get a little bit off on the angle, it's not a huge problem. We can actually transfer that onto the other piece. What's the most important part about cutting this dovetail is that we are square across the top, that is 90 degrees like this. If I put the square up here, I want to make sure that the saw is square. Don't run the saw back and forth. But you can check it. See how that's perfectly square like that. Now you can use the whole saw, light stroke. Don't bear down. Light pressure. And you'll just cut right to your baseline. Square across the top. Follow that line. If you get a little bit off on the angle, don't worry. Just cut down like that. But again, what's super important here is that you're perfectly square across the top. When I'm cutting this, I'll start out by cutting it like this. And I'll even check it sometimes, check it with a square, making sure that it's square right across the top like that. And once they're cut all the way through, you can even come back and check it with a square, making sure that it's nice and square right on top. That's actually the most important part about the tails. You got to make sure that those top cuts are perfectly straight. Now that we've got that, we've got this. We're going to remove this outside part. What we're going to do is we're going to actually use a square and a knife, again, the same knife wall method. If you haven't watched the Cutting a Through Dado video, you'll want to go back and watch that because we talk about the knife wall method. And I'm essentially using that same exact method here. So I put the knife in, slide the square up to it, angle the knife, and then just mark this part right here. So we're marking that. Now, I'm going to carry this line around. So you'll see I put the knife right in there, slide the square up to it, and the same way here, mark it. You can put the knife right in there, right there at the very tip of it. Slide the square up to it. And then bring this around like that. And then come back here and put the knife right in the tip right there. And then just mark just the waste side. The next step here is to create a knife wall so that I can saw this waste off. And we're going to come in straight in like this. One technique that I want you to notice here is that I'm putting my finger up against the stock, supporting the chisel. So I'm holding the chisel, pinching the chisel up close to the blade like this. And then my finger's resting against the stock and coming straight in, just like that. Now we've got a little wall that we can actually hold the saw up against and saw away that waste following the line straight down. You can actually hear the saw when it gets to the bottom. Actually we'll turn this around like this. Again, same technique. Come in like this. And I like to always have the outside facing me. Again, light pressure, let the saw do the work. Don't force the saw. There we go. Sometimes it's not necessarily the sawing that's important but the stopping of the sawing. If I saw too deep right here, like this, it would cut into that part. And we'd have a problem. Now we've got the tail, which is a pattern that we can use to transfer onto this piece right here. So we're going to go ahead and do that. I'm going to start by putting this piece upright in the vise. And put this piece on, making sure that those letters line up. You can see right there. We've got A and A. And the arrows are lining up right there. That's important. But it's sometimes difficult to hold this piece while I'm marking it. And I'll show you a little trick for that. You can take anything. I like to use a hand plane. And just take your hand plane and set it right here on your bench like this. Flush this right here so that it's flush. Bring this back. And then put that on, just like so. Now what I want to do is I want to get a bird's eye view straight down on top like this. If I look at it like this, it's not going to be accurate. I've got to look straight down like this. And I'm trying to line the baseline, that is this part right here, with the inside edge of this piece. Again, double checking that we have the letters lined up. I also want to align it straight this way. So I can feel that with my fingertips, feeling it. And then we'll bring this to where we've got that brought up to where there's no gap right there, right in this part. Let me get the pencil, and I'll show you. Right down inside there. Now we're ready to mark it. If I was using hardwood, I could use the knife. Hardwood, the fibers tend to be a little stiffer. And it holds definition well with the knife for marking with the grain, this is with the grain. You don't generally use a knife for with-the-grain cuts. It's mostly for cross-grain cuts. This time I'm going to use a pencil because we are using a soft wood. I do want to ensure that the pencil is sharp. Because if the pencil's not sharp, what's going to happen is what you'll see here. If I'm trying to draw or mark right in a juncture right here with a dull pencil, you can see like this. Here's my dull pencil. It's actually marking right out there, as opposed to a sharp pencil that's marking right inside that corner. So even if you used a 0.5 millimeter pencil, which you can use, that's going to be pretty accurate, one of those mechanical pencils, 0.5 lead. You can get it right in there. But if you sharpen this to where no light is reflecting off the tip, you can actually get finer. One method that I use is a piece of sandpaper. You can also use a chisel for getting a rough shape. And you'll notice that the pencil is long. I have to get a long shape there. And I've shaped that with a chisel like this. So I've got it nice and shaped to a long, slender point. Now one little side note, I have found that not all pencils are created equal. You got to get some nice made in America. These are the Ticonderoga pencils. They're wood, solid wood. And they sharpen up well. So get a good pencil. Then what we're going to do is we're going to sharpen the pencil by taking it on the sandpaper and rotating it like this. So you see what I'm doing. I'm rotating the pencil. And that way we have it just making that tip nice and sharp where there's no light reflecting off of it. So now that our pencil is nice and sharp, it's also very fragile. So we've got to mark very lightly. So I'm going to put pressure down here. It's already supported right there. I've got everything lined up. And we're going to mark right in there at that juncture, right there, lightly. Mark it very lightly right there at that juncture. So we can remove this. What's important here is that we mark the waste, which is this part right here. That's the part we're removing. This part needs to go in to form a 90-degree corner here. We want this to go in like this. So I'm going to remove that part right there. So I've got a mark on this side, the side facing me. I'm going to mark two lines going straight down because this has to come in straight like this. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to carry these lines. But they're going to be perfectly straight, going straight down. So I'll just put this on like this and mark this side and mark this side, as well. And then we'll just mark that as the waste. So now we're going to cut on the waste side of the line. Sometimes it's helpful to think in extremes here. So it really doesn't matter if the width of the curve of this saw. I mean I could use a curve that was half an inch wide, just for the sake of conversation here. And if we used a wide curve, as long as we kept that curve on the waste side of the line and left the pencil line, that is we'll leave the pencil line, the dovetail still should be tight. Sometimes I illustrate that point by taking a saw with big teeth like this and just starting to cut the joint. Again, if the teeth are on the waste side, the joint still should be tight. Of course, it's nicer to use the dovetail saw because the curve is finer, the cut is finer. It's easier to start it, too. So we leave the line. That's the bottom line. Just leave the line on the good side, and cut away on the waste side. Follow that line. You'll also notice I put my thumb here. And I can micro adjust with my thumb like this. And my saw rests against the thumb. So if I need to push the saw to one side, I just simply just push the saw over with my thumb like this. So we're just going to go straight down to the line. Now, the next step is to remove that waste. And if you've watched some of the other videos, you know that I'll often use a cutting gauge for scribing this baseline. But here I'm going to do it a little differently. I'm going to actually use the knife and the square, using the knife wall method. And the reason why is this slows down the process to where you can actually understand what's going on here and the importance of using the knife for scoring those cross-grain fibers. Now the other advantage here to using the knife is I don't put an unsightly line going all the way across. I'm just marking it on the waste side. So now what we're going to do is we're going to just take and put the knife right there in the corner, making a little mark right there in the corner. Now we can carry that around. So we've got that knife mark. I can just take the knife, locate the next mark with knife, and then carry that around to the back side, just like so. So it's essentially the same as even using a cutting gauge except now that I've used the square. So I make sure that this line is square, it's square to the edge there, to the face edge. And then it also is just marked on the waste side. So, again, this is the part we're going to remove. Now, you could clamp this in the vise, just like so, clamp it in the vise like this, and come in and create your knife wall like that. But you can also use a bench hook, which is very simple. I mean you can just make one of this. This I made out of some scrap wood. As you can see, it's well used. But a piece of wood here, you can even use plywood, and a couple boards that are even just glued. I've got these screwed down. But even just glue a couple boards like this. This is a bench hook, as the name implies. It hooks on to the edge of the bench. I'll even secure it doubly by putting it in the vise. So therefore it's secured well. The advantage to this is that I can now position this up against here. Because the last thing I want to do is hold this with my hand with the chisel like this. So now it's up against the stock. And I have my finger right here, pushing against it. So it makes a quick clamp, as you can see. I've got that in, just like so. And remove that. Now we'll come back with the knife and angle the knife to compensate for the double bevel, angle it in. And so we're creating that knife wall. Again, if you have not watched the video on cutting a dado, it's important that you do so so that you can learn how to create this knife wall. So now we've got an established wall, we can actually come back with our chisel and our mallet. And one thing that I'll do is I like to hold the chisel with the back of it facing this way. And I'm angling the chisel in, just a little bit, a few degrees in like this. So, essentially, the chisel is angled in where it's going slightly in like that, forming a V-cut on the inside. I'll turn this over. We'll do the exact same thing on this side. So you see I'm working from both sides to the center. This exact same technique works on hardwood. Again, we're using softwood, primarily so that we can learn the techniques for using the tools. And we're not struggling with trying a harder wood. So, therefore, the wood is not resisting us. So you see how we're doing this. One thing that I'm not doing is I'm not holding the chisel up here. And the reason why is because being that I'm angling like this, if I was to break all the way through, it would come crashing through the other side. And we'd have a gap. So I've simply dropped my fingers down like this. And so they're resting against the side. My thumb is pinching the chisel tight. And, therefore, my fingers are supporting the chisel and keeping that chisel from breaking all the way through. And it acts as a stop. So that's very important for an accurate cut here. So we'll just work this in. Sometimes I'll follow that angle. You can see we've got an angle here. I'm following that angle with the chisel. And there we go. We're almost through. Let's just make one more cut like this. So we're just going to come just in like so and just like that. Just removing a little bit more of that material. And this last cut will do it. This is where you got to be careful. Again, holding the chisel back. Yeah, yeah, it's through. So there we go. And then the piece comes out. And sometimes there'll be a little remnant of material in there. And we'll put that in a vise. And I'll show you how to pare that out of the bottom. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to pare this out. Now, one thing that I don't want to do is I don't want to come crashing through the back side and bust these fibers out on the backside. Wood is like these series of straws coming up. And if I just go right through, they can all break out on the backside. So I've got to work from both sides to the center. That's why I did this. So, again, finger up against here, nice and tight, holding the chisel, keeping the chisel. Now, if I just push straight in, nothing's really going to happen. I mean I can do that. I mean I could put a lot of pressure, and something would happen. But I don't want to put too much pressure and blow out the back side. The moment I take the chisel and slice it to the side, then it cuts. So watch. See how it just cuts, severs, severing those fibers. Just take a little bit off. And we've got a nice V-cut in the center. And now we'll test it. Now, when I test these joints, I don't take it out of the vise and do this. What needs to happen here is this piece needs to be secure in the vise. And this piece needs to come straight on top. And sometimes you'll even need to use a little bit of persuasion. The nice thing about using a mallet is we can get a-- or a rubber mallet is we can use this to get a direct blow straight on top here. There we have it. And that's a nice, tight joint, one that will last for hundreds of years. And really it's not relying on any glue. Normally I wood glue a joint like this. But the joint is not relying on glue. So that concludes how to do a single dovetail. I recommend this joint for even warming up before you do a more complex joinery project.

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Cutting the Mortise & Tenon Joint

The next step here is to lay out the position for the mortise and tenons. But before I do that, I'd like to just draw a little illustration to help clarify exactly what we're doing here by positioning the mortise and tenons in place. We've got these pieces, which are 5/8 of an inch thick. Let me draw a picture of a tenon here, which will, again, help illustrate this. So we've got the tenon here. So this is what our tenon is going to look like. You can see here this is the width of the stock right here. There's our shoulder, right? Our shoulder goes across the grain. The cheek runs with the grain. But this is what is referred to as a bare faced tenon. And what I mean by that is it only has a shoulder on one side. The other side, this backside, has just a bare face. It's just perfectly flat. Actually, this is a bare faced tenon on three sides, on the top and the bottom and at the backside. So it's only shouldered on the front. We're going to call this the front right there. There's our shoulder. There's our cheek. Now, the top one here, the top one, this tenon length is only going to be a quarter of an inch. It's only going to be one quarter of an inch in length. Now, this bottom one is going to be equidistant. So we'll determine that distance here in just a moment. So far as the width, we know that the overall width of this stock here is 5/8 of an inch. We know that's 5/8 of an inch right there. And then we know that this distance here, well, what we're going to make it is we're going to make it a half of an inch wide. So we're going to make a half inch mortise there, leaving only an eighth of an inch for this shoulder right there. Being that the tenons are going to be only shouldered on the front, and they're going to be full width, we can actually take this actual piece to determine the width on the actual shelf. I'm going to actually mark the general location for these mortises right now. I want them to be towards the front, and I want to mark it while this is all together. This is important because it's easy to accidentally put a mortise maybe in this location and then in this location if it was taken apart. So if I mark it while it's all together, I'm ensuring that I put the mortises in the correct location. So we're going to put a little mark, maybe just a little x right there in the front right there, one right there, and one right there. So mortise, mortise, mortise, and mortise. Then we're going to take the width of this stock, which this stock is about 2 inches in width. And we'll take this and just position it right up here. So I'm going to mark right along there and right along there. But you'll notice that mark does not run all the way across. The mortise is just in this front right here. We'll put it over here, and we'll mark right up along there and right up along there as well. We'll do the exact same thing on the bottom where these other second set of mortises are going, right there and right there as well. Now we can go ahead and take the shelf apart and begin marking the actual width of the mortises using a mortise gauge. Before we mark the actual position of the mortise with the mortise gauge, I want to clarify something. This top mortise, it only goes in a quarter of an inch. So it does not go all the way through. This one, on the other hand, does go all the way through. So these layout lines that I just marked on here, I want to carry those to the other side. Let's do that now. We'll take this, and we'll follow this line around to the other side. So we're going to have a mortise in this location. And then again, we're going to carry this line around to the other side. Great. Now that we've got that, let's go ahead and lay out the actual position of the mortise from the front edge here. Again we're going to set our mortise gauge to the width of the chisel that we'll be using. In this case, it'll be 1/2 inch chisel. We'll set the two pins, just as we did in the mortise exercise, in the three joints video series. So we'll set the chisel to the distance between the pins, which is half an inch. And then from the fence to the first movable point, it will be 5/8 of an inch. Let's just use the thickness of the stock. We'll bring that right up just like that, locking it down. And that'll be the measurement. You can also test this too. Whenever I do a mortise, sometimes I like to just pick up a piece of scrap wood, poke two points in there or even move it along, and just see how the chisel falls in between there, making sure that the chisel falls smartly between those lines, right there in between those lines. If it's too wide, well then we're going to have a problem. If it's too narrow, conversely, there will be a problem as well. Now we're going to mark the width of the mortise using the gauge. And this one is going to be slid all the way up here, just like so. This one here, I'm going to actually put two points right in there and then slide it right up to those two points. Flip this over and mark between those two points as well, popping at those two points. Again, it's helpful to mark lightly. It's oftentimes a temptation to mark too heavy initially. You can always go back and deepen those lines. But mark lightly at first. That'll score the line. You'll be fighting the tool a lot less doing it that way. This one here on the other side is a through mortise. OK, let's chop some mortises. I'm going to start by working on this top mortise here. And again, remember, this only goes a quarter of an inch deep. I don't mind if it goes a little bit deeper, 3/8 of an inch. I just want to make sure that doesn't go 5/8 of an inch. That would be a through mortise. Let's start here. We're going to start a little bit away from the line. And we're going to slowly increase it, just as we did in our mortising video. You remember how we angled the chisel slightly this way, and I'm holding it with the precision grip, primarily because my goal here is not to go very deep. I only want to go a little bit more than a quarter here. Now, when we get towards the end, you'll notice I've got a little bit of material right there. Now, it's very easy to chunk that out. If that part chunks out, don't worry about it. It's not a problem. It's just a challenge to get to leave it in there. Nobody will ever see it. But if you can leave that in there, it's a good exercise for working in this short grain right here. Let me show you how I accomplish that. As we get closer, the goal is to take a much smaller bite. If I take the chisel straight in like this, I can guarantee that this piece right back here is going to blow out. So what I've got to do is I've got to come at an angle and follow it like this and then gradually increase the chisel to a vertical stand, just like that. You see how we just slowly work it up, taking off a little bit of material at a time. Now that piece is still intact. Now I'm going to come over here and work this part, again, just as we did, coming in at an angle like this, and again bringing the chisel up to that vertical position. Now I'm creeping back to the line. And there we have it. We've got that-- maybe just one more hit right there. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to come back with a smaller chisel. A 3/8 chisel will work well. And we'll come back in here, bevel down. And we'll use this like a plane. You see how I'm wiggling it back and forth? I want to be careful that I'm not holding it back here, because if I'm just pushing like this, I can also blow through and break that part out there. Come back this way and clean that out. If you used a small router plane for this, you can actually use that same setting on your router plane to ensure that it is the correct depth. One thing that I like to do is I like to check it with a square to make sure that it is indeed at least a quarter of an inch. 5/16 is actually better because the tenon length is a quarter of an inch, and I don't want it bottoming out. So I'm just testing it along here. Let's look at that measurement, and it is 5/16 of an inch in depth. So I'm happy with that. I'm going to come back and just clean up the walls just a little bit, just because they're a little fuzzy from working it with the chisel. And that's what we want. So we've got that mortised out just like that. Let's turn our attention to this lower mortise, which is a through mortise. So we get to go 5/8 of an inch on this one. However, I am going to work from both sides on this one. So we're going to come in, go halfway down, 5/16 down this way, and then go 5/16 up from the other sides. So we'll turn it over. So again, it's the same exact technique. We'll start with a half inch chisel. Make a stop cut, angle the chisel in like this. You'll see I'm just going to kind of work this like this. Each time, I'm removing the chips. What that does is it enables the chisel to have clearance to be able to go deeper with each subsequent cut. Now, this one I'm going to come all the way here to the top. You can see we're going to come all the way through into that dado. So I'll even sometimes score the side right there. Maybe come in with a 3/8 chisel and take that away. Let's come back this way and then work this nice and straight. We'll come all the way up to that line, all the way up to that line. There we go. Now we can take the 3/8 chisel, bevel down, and work it just like that I'm just going to come along with my chisel and just score along the sides, cleaning up any little of those what I call the fuzzies that are on the side there. Back in with this chisel, and now it's ready to come in from the other side. Before we flip this over to cut the mortise from the other side, I want to do one thing. I want to take my half inch chisel, and I want to make an incision right here at the bottom of the dado. The reason for that is when I'm coming through from the other side, that incision is going to keep this piece of wood right there in the dado from chipping out. So I've made that little knife cut there, the chisel cut. And now we're ready to mortise it from the other side. I'm going to come in here and make two stop cuts along the edge. Being that this is a through mortise, I'm going to actually use the method that I introduced there in the video we did on cutting a mortise, where I talk about making a little mini mortise. And that's just a nice way of outlining this outside edge. It keeps that edge from being torn, and it also makes a nice place for the chisel to be able to follow in a nice straight line. Now, the pine can be a little bit spongy, so I've got to be careful holding this more at an angle, especially coming through, because I don't want to break it out. I really want to do more of a cutting action. By holding more of an angle, I'm kind of cutting with the fibers like this, as opposed to just more upright, where I'd be forcing the fibers straight down and breaking them. Now I'll turn the chisel around. The bevel is facing me. And I'm going to come in like this and work in this direction here. Come back here. Remove some of this material, and then come back like this. Again, I'm just going to come in here and cut that in just a little. You see how I'm really holding the chisel tight. The reason why is because I'm trying to take off as little of material as possible. If I was to hold the chisel loosely and hit this, it could go blowing all the way through and bust something out on the other side. Back in with the 3/8 chisel, we're just going to remove some of that material there. We can even come along with our one inch chisel and just slice it along the side and clean it up. You'll notice that there's a little bit of material left in there. That will actually keep the tenon from fitting. So I'm going to clean that up. Again, very carefully come in like this and angle the chisel back like this. Again, really holding that chisel tight, pinching the chisel, and then coming at it like that. We're going to just clean the side up. You could even take the chisel and run it in there just like this. Run it back and forth, and that'll clean it up nicely. One last thing that I want to do is I want to make sure that this line is in line with this line. And I can do that by putting the square, again, starting from the inside here. And we'll drop it down. And make sure-- now you see, there's a little bit of a gap right there on the outside. What that's telling me is it's telling me if I was to fit the tenon from this side, coming in like this, that I'd have a gap right out there. And it's also telling me that this is a little bit high right there. So I'm going to take this and chisel that back just slightly. The way I'm going to clean that is by taking the half inch chisel, taking it and-- I know I've got to take a little bit of material off, only as much material as the gap is showing. So we're going to just take this and come in like that. Again, you see how I'm really holding that chisel back. If I let the chisel go, it could blow out the other side, and we'd really have a mess on our hands. Now we'll test it again, and you can see that the square is nice and tight right up along that edge. Let's test it on the top. It also is good. Now I can move on to mortising the second side. I'm just finishing up the second side here. We're just cleaning up the edges, making sure it's nice and crisp and clean inside. We'll check it with our square from the inside, making sure that it's good and tight. And I think we're good to go. The next step would be cutting the tenons. So we've got to reassemble the shelf, and then we'll mark and cut the tenons. Now that we've got the shelf fit back together, the next step is to determine which of these we want to be the top and which to be the bottom. I've got this one here that's got a little knot on the end. And I think I'm going to put that towards the top because it's long anyway, and I could cut that knot off. Another thing that I want to consider when I position these pieces and mark which one is left and right and top and bottom is the grain orientation. And that is we know that there's going to be an arch that we're going to cut into this. So if your wood happens to have some sort of arching grain already in the material, configure the piece to match the actual shape so that the grain follows that arch. In other words, right here there's a very, very subtle arch here. So I would want to put that to where the arch that I cut in follows that grain line. It's especially important if you have a very pronounced grain. You certainly wouldn't want to reverse it. So I'm going to mark this as the top, and I'm going to mark this as the left and the right. And this one here is pretty straight grain. Let's just mark this one. We'll just call it mid, and then we'll call it left and right, middle. And there we go. So I'm going to start here with this left side because I want to cut this off. I'm going to show you how I layout that tenon just on this one side. So we know that this top tenon is only going to be a quarter of an inch long, which is-- most tenons are usually longer than that. But this is an exercise here that we'll do. Quarter of an inch long. Again, no need to use a ruler, although you could. I just simply get a quarter inch chisel and position it right here on the end. And all I'm using the quarter inch chisel for is just the length, to determine the length of the actual tenon. So we position it like that, put the little knife mark there. Take the square and square that line across. Now, it's extremely important, as I've mentioned in previous videos there, that the shoulder is square. That's what's going to determine whether this whole entire piece is square. As you can see, we get a little movement like that. Because as I mentioned in the dado video, most of the dadoes have-- their strength is down in this direction. So when combined with other joints, as you'll see here with the mortise and tenons, that will give this rigidity, and it will help ensure that this is square. But the squareness comes in here in the shoulders. So make sure that those shoulder lines are perfectly square. So we've got that mark. We're only going to mark one side right now. Now I've got to reset the gauge. And back to our illustration here, we know that this is a bare-faced tenon, so it's only shoulder on one side. So instead of using the mortise gauge. where it has two points, we're only going to use the single point right here. We're going to set that to our half inch chisel, right to the point. Half inch chisel right to the point there. And we're going to scribe this from the backside. And that will make the actual tenon width a half of an inch. You could do this free hand like this. The problem with doing it free hand is that it's easy to get off and move it around. So you can simply put it in the vice and help support the gauge with your left hand and guide it like this. So I'll just take it and run it along like that. Again, just a few strokes there. Now you can see we're going to go ahead and cut that little bit off. That's all we're going to remove, is that little bit. That'll leave us with a quarter inch this way and a half an inch that way. And again, we're only cutting one side. Make your shoulder cut here. And we're only going down an 1/8 of an inch. So it's not very many saw strokes. Make sure that you stop it before you go all the way through. And being that we're removing so little material, oftentimes just use the chisel along the cheek there to just split off the material. You can even set the chisel right in the line and take that right off. I can come across the grain and clean that up. So there we have it. We've got one shoulder complete for the upper piece right here. Let's go ahead and lay out the bottom tenon. Now, the easiest way to measure this one is to position this just like this and make it equidistant and actually stand it up on edge like this and make sure it's equidistant. That is, it's the correct measurement from side to side. You can even take a ruler to help you measure that. In this case, let's see, it is 3/8 of an inch over there and a little over 7/16. So I've got to actually come back this way just a smudge there. 7/16 there and about 7/16 there. Now what I've got do is I'm going to mark this right up in here. We're going to mark just one side only. We're just going to mark the left side. So I'm going to take the knife on the inside here and just put a little knife mark there. Again, I'm marking the shoulder line on the inside. So there's our knife cut. Now we're going to score that across, marking our shoulder using the square. Lightly, then heavier. Put it in the vice. Working from the back side, we'll use the exact same measurement. Make sure we use the single point here and mark it from the back side. Slice it. Slide it down. And now we can remove that material. Let's go ahead and cut the shoulder line. So always make your little knife [? wall ?] cut there, which helps guide the saw. Remember, we're only going 1/8 of an inch deep, so we've got to be careful that we don't go too deep. Now, there's two ways to remove this material here. I could chisel it off, but before I chisel it off, I want to inspect the grain. And I can see right here that the grain is clearly making a downward dive. And if I was to chisel that, I could ruin that tenon. So I'm fairly certain that the only way to remove this material is to saw it. I'll put it upright like this in the vice. I can use the dovetail saw and just put it against my thumb, put my thumb there on the side, and saw the cheek off. Listen as you get towards the end. You don't want to run the saw into the shoulder. You'll hear the tone change. And there it is right at the end. It's off. Now, I want to make sure that it's nice and crisp right there in the corner, and that there's no debris right there in the corner. So we'll just come back with the chisel and clean it up going across the grain. If you work it across the grain, work the chisel across the grain, you don't have to worry about the grain diving down because we're working across those fibers as opposed to with the fibers. Now that we've got the upper one cut and the lower one cut, I'm going to now mark the other side using the scribe method. What we're going to do is we want to determine now this distance from inside here to inside there. That's the measurement that's important. Again, of course, I could take out my tape measure, and I could try to define that distance. Just take this and say, OK, that is 13 and one, two, three, four, 5/16 plus maybe a 64th of an inch. And then come over here. You go over here, and you say, OK, that's 13 and 5/16 plus a 64th and mark it. But there's some variation, both in the end of the tape measure and even in our marking, our ability to mark. It's much more accurate to use the scribe method. So what we're going to do is we're going to actually put this right inside here. I'll turn this around so you can see it. There's our tenon shoulder right there. We're going to put it in there nice and tight. Now, if you'll notice, I can push this to one side. Now you can see right in there I've got a gap right in there. If I go ahead and mark this other side with that gap in there, then this is going to be loose because that's not an accurate distance from side to side. So what I've got to do is I've got to pull this to where there's no gap right in there. It's nice and tight all the way in there. And we'll use our knife to scribe this other corner. Again, I'm not scribing the entire width of this. I'm just really angling the knife, putting a little mark right there in the corner. Now we're going to do the exact same thing on this lower one. Again, we'll put it down here. Making sure that it's good and square and snug in there. Now that we've got both of these marked, we can use our square to scribe that shoulder line. Again, the square is the most important thing here to obtain a perfectly square shoulder. Now, you'll notice on this top one, we only have a tenon that's 1/4 of an inch in length. But we've got all this extra material here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my 1/4 inch chisel and add to this shoulder line. Add to it, put my knife mark there, and scribe it again. See what happens? I just pressed too hard with the knife, and the knife actually slid away from the square. So very important you press very lightly with the knife, and then go back heavier. So I've added a quarter of an inch to my shoulder. And this all is waste. So we're going to cut that off. This is only on the upper one. Now let's go ahead and mark the tenons in the exact same fashion that we did earlier, using the marking gauge. Again, from the back side, we'll put this in the vice. Defining the width of the tenon, which in this case is 1/2 an inch. We'll do the same thing on the lower one as well. This is the lower one that we've marked the longer tenon. Again, I'm going to mark this right here. If you're using a marking/mortise gauge, it's important that you make sure you use the right end. So I've got the two points on this side, and the single point on this side. In this case, we're using the single point. So don't make a mistake and flip it over and mark it like this. You want to make sure that you have and use that single point right there. That's the one we set our chisel to. Let's bring that same line down like this. Now we're going to cut the shoulder using the dovetail saw here. You could also use a cross-cut saw for this, but I like to use the dovetail saw. The teeth are fine, and it cuts just fine. This grain is actually going nice and straight, and I could just chisel away that cheek material right there. So I'm going to come in here, starting above the cut, and work this in. By starting above the cut, just in case the grain dives down, I'm still safe. But if I take off too much, I can get in trouble. You see here, the grain is actually diving in slightly. So I've got to be very careful where it's diving in. So I'm going to actually come across and work it across the grain, and that should save me there. Now we'll cut the shoulder and the cheek on the upper tenon. Now that our tenons are cut, we can actually test fit our shoulders prior to taking the shelf apart. The way you can do that is you can just simply put this in place right here, and it should fit right in between there. You can see how it fits, almost fits. There we go. You can see that the shoulders are now nice and tight right between these two points. We can test that as well on the lower one. And that's good and tight. Now we need to fit the actual tenon into the mortise. I'll have to take this apart prior to fitting the tenons into each corresponding mortise. Let's start with these upper mortise and tenons. We know that this one is the right side, and this one is the right tenon. So we'll go ahead and position this right in here like this. Now, there's two dimensions that this has to fit. It has to fit both in the width, and it has to fit in the width in this direction. We'll call this the height, and we'll call this the width. So it's got to fit in the width this way and the height that way. So I'm going to start by fitting it like this. Let's fit the width. And you can see as we fit it in there, it fits nicely. Now, if it was too tight, I would either trim the mortise or the tenon. I would look at the mortise first, making sure the mortise was nice and clean and crisp if it was too tight. And then if it was a little ragged, I'd clean that up. Then, if I was happy with the mortise, then I would look at the actual tenon and see how close we were to the line. And you can pare it accordingly. Now that we fit the actual width, now we need to fit the height. So we can fit it like this, again, laying this down at an angle like this. And you can see that's going to fit nicely. So now you see by isolating these two dimensions here, we have made it easier to locate any potential problem. Now we can fit the whole thing down in there, and it should fit nicely. There we go. That fits nicely. One thing I'm looking for is to make sure that there's no gap right in there. If this was sticking up like this, there could be two reasons why it would do that. Let's just do a little illustration to help show you what could be the potential problem. So I'm going to draw a tenon on the board here. So here we have it. This is a tenon like this. Well, let's just draw a tenon how it looks. There's our bare face right here. And this is the shoulder. Ideally, we want the shoulder to be perfectly square like this. What can happen sometimes is you can start out square, but then have some ragged junk right there. So when the actual-- when it goes into its mortise, it'll hit right up here, and you'll have a gap right in this area right there. So you need to make sure that this is nice and clean. The other problem, potential problem, is it will bottom out right here. So when it's going into the mortise like this, it'll bottom out here, thus having a gap right there. So that's something that you can check pretty simply by sticking your square inside that mortise just like this, then taking that measurement-- you don't even have to know what that measurement is, you can just take it right here and make sure that that distance is greater than the actual length of the tenon. Now that I'm happy with that one, I'm going to turn my attention to the other one. And the process is exactly the same. We'll start by fitting the width. I'm happy with the width. Feels good. Let's check the height. Height seems all right, although I see a little bit that I would like to clean up in there because I don't want to blow that out. So I'm just going to clean up a little bit in the height. Let's fit that in there. Nice. I will say, pine does have a little bit of a compression factor. So don't worry. If it's a little bit too tight, the pine will actually compress slightly. Now that we fit the upper mortise and tenons, let's fit the lower ones. So again, the process is pretty much the same. However, if you remember, when we did the mortise, the through mortise and tenon in the three basic joints video series, you'll remember that I fit the through mortise and tenon from the outside first. So I start here on the outside, making sure that it fits. Again, let's do it the same way. We're going to fit the width first. That's a little bit on the tight side. It's a little bit too tight. Let's check the height. Again, it's a little bit tight that way. So there's a couple options. I could either clean up the side of the mortise here, or I could clean this tenon. Let's look at the tenon. I can see a little bit of the line left from my marking gauge. So that tells me that I can pare down and still have the integrity of a nice straight tenon. There's also a little bit of a ragged edge right there. So let me start here on the mortise because I don't want to have a ragged edge here. I'm going to take the chisel and just pare it along the side. And then we'll come in, test it again. Ah, just that little bit. Sometimes it just takes the tiniest, tiniest bit. Now let's check it in the height. Again, that was a little tight as well. There's a couple things we could do. What would actually be easier than actually increasing this distance, because I'd be chopping along this end grain, I should actually take a little bit of material off the bottom of the tenon right there. And that's pretty easily done by just putting it in the vice. I'm going to make a knife line right here and just take a little bit of material off using the chisel and just pare it off. Essentially, we made a little shoulder here on the bottom. So we're just going to pate that, pare that off right there on the bottom. And now it should fit nicely. That's what we want there, a nice squeaky tight fit. We'll test it from the other side. Again, that shoulder needs to be to the front. This is the left side. Let's go ahead and fit it in. Now I'm hitting here. So I've got to overhang it off the edge of this board because this is a through tenon. Nice. And that is what we want. Good and tight there on that shoulder and tight all the way around there. I like that. Let me go ahead and take that out and very carefully take that out, and we're going to fit the other side in exactly the same way. And that's it. All the tenons are fit. Now I know that they fit shoulder to shoulder. I know the tenons fit. So I know that the whole shelf should go together, although I would like to dry fit the whole thing together before I glue it up. But before we glue it up, we need to mark the arches on these pieces, and we need to cut those. We're going to introduce a new tool, which is a spoke shave, which is a lot of fun to use, and I think you'll find many uses for it.

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Inside the Mortise

Hi. I'm Frank. And I thought in this video we would talk about what's actually going on inside of the mortise. What I've done here is clamped a piece of plate glass onto the bench here. And I'm going to show you what is actually happening inside this mortise while we're mortising. I think this might help you when you're mortising for you to understand what's going on, how the chisel should be reacting inside the material. So let's get started. I'm going to start by making that straight cut just like this. And you'll notice the chisel is fairly straight as we start. That's our stop cut. The next cut is angled slightly. And you see how the chisel actually goes this way. And then that stop cut allowed the chisel to come back this way. I'm going to pull the chisel back like this to break the chip and then come up like this. So, you see, the chip is gone. Let's do the next one. Again, back like this and then back like this. You see I'm only advancing forward about an eighth of an inch at a time. But you can see as we're going in, the chisel is cutting in, cutting into the material. You'll notice how I'm angling the chisel now. It's about 10 degrees. And what happens is that bevel forces the chisel down. And it cuts each one of those chips. And you see how fast we're able to go deep. I'm mean, we're fairly close to our depth line at this point. And this is just still on the first pass. Again, I'm working away from me. The chisel is actually leaning away for me. And the bevel is facing away from me, as well. So I'm steering the chisel as we go in, making sure that it's keeping it straight and flat. Now, when we get to the end here, I've actually got to turn the chisel around, so the bevel is facing me. We're going to follow that same angle just like this. But I've increased the angle slightly. Now I'm going to pull it back. If I started straight in like this, the chisel wouldn't have anywhere to go. So I've got to actually follow that angle, the wall there, and increase that angle until we gradually come up to a vertical stand. There we go. Now I can come back with a smaller chisel. We'll use a quarter-inch inch chisel. And bevel down, you see how the bevel is down. Working like a plane, we'll just take the chips right out of there. Now you can see, right on the side right there, that we've got to take that part in right there. So I'm going to come from the other side and work the chisel with the bevel facing this way and pry back that way. Taking it in like, this prying back like this. Gradually coming up to increase that to 90 degrees. Nice and square. In fact, I don't mind actually under cutting the mortise a little bit, if it's a little bit back like this. I'll place that right on there and then just cut that back like that. Now, I'm going to come in with the quarter-inch chisel, bevel down, and just remove that material. See how I'm wiggling the chisel like that. Remove that material. And this is the exact technique that you want to use while you're mortising all four legs of your table. And there you have it.

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Securing the Mortise and Tenon

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you a couple different ways of securing a through mortise and tenon. I'm going to show you one, and that is using drawbore technique. That's a technique that's been around for hundreds of years. And it was used in the place of clamps. It's a very strong method of actually holding the joint together. Mortise and tenons had been in use-- as I mentioned-- for thousands of years, really. And they're used to hold together tables, and beds, and chairs, and windows, and doors, and even buildings. Most timber frame buildings are held together with mortise and tenons and drawbore construction, using the exact same technique that I'm about to show you. I fit this earlier together and cut it, fit it. We're actually going to take it apart again. And you'll see we'll just take this apart, just like so. And I'm going to drill a hole into this piece right here, all the way through. So we'll use a brace and bit. And we're going to drill a 3/8 hole here, all the way through this piece. When I see that tip coming through I will stop,-- so that it doesn't blow out the backside-- turn this piece around, and drill it from the other side. So now that we've had our 3/8 hole drilled through here, what I'm going to do is actually fit the tenon back together. Having done some timber framework myself, I will say it's a lot easier to fit together these small pieces than it is a beam that's 12 inches by 12 inches and 50 feet long. But it gives you great respect for those craftsman of old that would do this exact same technique without the aid of any forklift and such. They had to fit the joint together and, as I'm doing here, simply mark it. Then just take that 50 foot long beam and take it apart like this-- back apart. Now you can see we've got the hole there. Now the key to drawboring is to actually offset that hole towards the shoulder. So in this case, I'm going to take and I'm going to offset that hole-- in this case, maybe a 1/16 of an inch-- towards the shoulder, just like so. And that will draw that tenon and up nice and tight. So I'm just going to bring this over here, offset it, and bore the hole all the way through. And now the holes will be offset. If you see inside of there, you can see the holes are actually offset inside. Now when I drive a peg through there it will actually pull this together and make it extremely tight. Another method here-- and I wouldn't usually combine these methods-- but just for the sake of demonstration, let's just make a couple saw cuts right here to demonstrate another method. And that is the use of wedge-- wedges-- to actually lock this joint together. Again, I wouldn't combine both of these in a piece-- in a furniture piece-- but I'm doing this solely for the sake of the demonstration here. So I've put two saw cuts like this. Let's put this back together just like so. And we'll go ahead and drive in a peg. I'm going to cut a little peg here off two-- a little bit longer. We'll cut that off. This is a dry oak peg. And typically these would have been hand-shaped, even with little facets on it. Those facets can help grab the fibers as it's being driven in here. I also want to take and taper the ends. So I'm just going to come in here and taper the end. And that will help feed the peg into the hole. And it'll help draw this up nice and tight. I like to use a metal hammer when driving home a wooden peg here, just because I get more of a positive blow with it-- more of a consistent blow. You can see what's happening is this is actually going in. I had a little gap right there and that gap is disappearing because it is pulling up tight. And you can see this is super, super tight. The shoulders are perfectly tight right there. And can even see a slight curve in the peg because it's drawn it in nice and tight. Just a super way-- you can go to museums and find furniture that was made 300 years ago that was held together using this exact same technique. And the furniture is just as strong and tight as the day it was made. Now that I've done the drawbore peg here I'd like to just show you what you can do by putting some wedges in there. Again, typically, I wouldn't combine both techniques here, but this is just for the sake of demonstration. I'm going to cut a couple wedges and we'll drive them in there. Couple. There's one wedge and there is another wedge here. And you can see these are somewhat sizable wedges. That's fairly thick material, when combined. And I think you'll be amazed at what actually happens when we drive these wedges home. I'm going to put the wedges in on both of these equally and drive them in. What's partially happening here is the word is compressing as it's going in. It gets to a certain point that you don't want to go too far. But you can see it is actually driving in and securing that, making a super tight, tight joint. And then I can come back, cut that off, even plane it. And you can see. [MUSIC PLAYING]

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Using a Hand Plane

Hi, my name is Frank Strazza with the Heritage School of Woodworking. And in this video, I'm going to talk about some of the different hand planes. I'm going to narrow it down to the hand planes that I use in my everyday woodworking, as well as how to adjust the plane to get the most accurate shaving. We're going to talk about the different parts of the planes and some of these different sizes and what the planes are used for. You can see there's a whole array of planes here. These are typically called bench planes. The reason for that is their used on the bench. They're used for flattening your material. There's a lot of different planes, specialty planes, such as molding planes that are used for shaping the edge of a board. This is a typical molding plane. Here, you can see there's a profile that's actually cut into the plane. This is a wooden molding plane. And again, you can have hundreds of these for different profiles. A little bit different than what we have here and that is bench planes. You'll notice I've got different sizes here, ranging from small all the way up to a large one here. I've thrown in a few different configurations here. We've got a low angle plane here and here. These are low angle planes. And you'll notice that every single one of these planes are pretty much configured the same way. We've got the iron right here, which in most of these planes is bedded at 45 degrees. The iron is angled like this. These are referred to as high angle planes or bevel down planes. So why the different sizes? Well Stanley was the one who came up with different sizes. And some of these are Stanley's and some are some current planes that are being made nowadays. But you'll see Stanley came up with some different sizes. They started actually with a number one and went all the way through to a number eight. I don't have all the sizes here. But I've got a number two. Let's see. I actually have a number three. And then, there was a number four which was sat right in the middle. I've got two number four and a halves. Here's a number five. This is that low angle plane trying to confuse you. Stanley actually did a five and a half they did a number six and a number seven, which was a little longer, and then a number eight. So they came, did a number one all the way up through number eight. The number really just denoted just the size and the length and the width as well. So all of the Stanley planes are pretty much configured in the same way. They all have pretty much the same parts. There's some slight variations to them. Now, why the reason for the different sizes? Well, the small planes make nice collector's items. They actually work well. This is actually my son's plane. It fits well in his small hands and he can plane well. The number four and four and a half are generally used as a smoothing plane. The number five plane was referred to as a jack plane or a four plane. A jack plane, it got its name because it was used as a jack of all planes. It could be used for both smoothing. It could be used for a little bit of jointing, because it's a little longer. The number six again can be used as a four plane, used before some of the other planes. Also its length enables you to join with it. And the longer the plane, number seven and number eight, are purely jointer planes. And they're used for flattening the stock. Because of the length of the plane, the length of the plane enables you to be able to ride over any low spots in the wood and bring in all the high spots down and making it flat. Whereas a shorter plane is going to ride in and out of the inconsistencies in the material. Most of the wood nowadays that we prepare is prepared using machines, using a jointer and a planer. So a lot of these planes have fallen in this use. So normally where we would've used a four plane and scrub plane to scrub the material down and bring it down to size. Most of that is done with a machine. So we can narrow our use of planes. However, there are a few planes that I find to be absolutely essential. The plane that I use actually most often is a four and a half. I've got a Stanley four and a half right here and a modern maker's plane, which is called a Lie-Nielsen, which I find to be one of the best made planes nowadays. If you're in the market for a plane I highly recommend the Lie-Nielsen plane. I often use a block plane as well, a low angle block plane and a low angle jack plane. I find these three planes to be almost essential in your tool kit. If you want to add to this kit right here, you can get a jointer plane. I use a jointer plane for edge jointing, but we'll cover more of that in future videos. I'm going to put a lot of these planes out of the way and talk more specifically about the Stanley style plane, which as I mentioned earlier, are all configured in the same way. So we'll put all of these out of the way. And we'll focus just on this four and a half. I like the heft, the size of the four and a half. It works well for smoothing our material. Again, we pretty much surface all of our material, bring it down that is to size using machines. But the final servicing and the final shaping can be done with a smoothing plane. Now, when I talk about this plane, and I mention the parts. These same parts are applicable to any of the Stanley style planes. I mention Bailey, but Stanley, Bailey pretty much the same. So here's a Lie Nielsen number eight. The same parts are in this number four and a half or in this Stanley four and a half. What we have here is we've got the rear handle or the rear tote. We've got the front tote. We've got the cap iron which holds the whole blade assembly in place. There's two parts to the blade assembly. You've got the iron. And you've got the chip breaker. The chip breaker sits on top of the iron. This part is the frog. That's what the blade assembly sits on. We've got the lateral adjustment, which adjusts the blade side to side. We also have a depth adjustment right here, which adjusts the blade forwards and backwards. That's what gives us our depth. Now on the Lie Nielsen planes, the chip breaker almost looks like the blade. You've got a bevel on this side a bevel on this side. Some people can confuse the chip breaker with the blade, putting it in backwards. The main difference here is, of course, the blade is sharp, but it's also a longer. This part of the chip breaker is actually removable by loosening this screw and sliding this back, sliding this to the side like this, and taking this off. As I mentioned earlier, the blade is beveled down. There's the bevel right there. And if you watch our video on sharpening a hand plane, you can actually see the different configurations for how to sharpen a plane. With this smoothing plane I tend to put a slight camber in the iron. And I often take the corners off as well, so that the corners don't dig into the material when you're planing. We can test this to see how sharp this is. I like to just test it on my thumbnail. And if it grabs my thumbnail, holding it flat like this, then I know it's sharp. And I've sharpened this up and it's razor sharp ready to go. So here's the iron bevel down like this. The chip breaker goes on like this. And you'll see the chip breaker. It has a little curve right here, and then the bevel like this. So the chip breaker goes on like this. It's slid on just like this. Bring it around. And you want to bring it up as close as you can. I like to bring it less than a sixteenth of an inch from the edge. What the chip breaker does is again bevel down here. When you're planing along, the chip will actually hit this bevel right here. And it'll pull it back. And as the name implies, it breaks the chip. Let's bring this up. And I'm going to tighten this up just like that. And we'll put the whole iron assembly back into the plane just like this. Now, when I put this in, I want to make sure that it's sitting flat against the frog. You can see right here that there's a gap right there. And I've got to wiggle it around, even take the lateral adjustment, which is right here. This is the lateral adjustment, the depth adjustment. You'll notice when I turn this it moves this part back and forth. That's our depth adjustment. So when I put this blade assembly in place here, we can move it. Move it back and forth like this. Wiggle this. And you can now see that it sits flat against the frog. That's very important. Let's put the cap iron back on here like this. Now, don't tighten this down to tight. You want to just make this somewhat snug, but well, even maybe a little loose. Where you get your tightening action from, is when you take the lever here, and you lower it down. It actually puts pressure. As you can see, it's going to put pressure against that screw and make it tight. Now it's locked in place. The frog can be slid forwards and backwards to adjust the mouth opening. Personally, I don't really mess with it too much on the four and a half plane. However, I do adjust the frog opening, which is more easily adjusted on the low angle plane. I adjust that frequently. And I use that mostly for figured woods and end-grain. That is set up a little bit differently. And we'll cover how that's set up in future videos. Now, let's go on to adjusting the plane. There's two adjustments for this plane, both the depth adjustment and the side to side adjustment. So we have what we call our lateral adjustment, which is right here, and our depth adjustment. Both of those have to be fine tuned. Now, when I accept my lateral adjustment, that means I want the blade to be cutting equally on either side. I never want to have the blade cutting deeper on one side, never. This is adjusted only to get it perfect to where it's cutting equally on both sides. However, the depth adjustment can be adjusted and will be adjusted depending on how much material I'm trying to remove. If I'm trying to remove a lot of material, I'm going to set the blade deeper. If I'm just trying to smooth, just take very fine shavings off, I'm going to back the blade off to where it's taking a little bit off. So let's start with the lateral adjustment. I can take a piece of scrap wood here, a piece a pine, putting it in the vice like this. The first thing I'm going to do is adjust the lateral adjustment. Sometimes I can adjust both the depth adjustment and the lateral adjustment simultaneously. But I'm going to do that by testing at both on the pine and feeling it with my thumb. You want to get it to where you can feel the depth with your thumb without even having to running over a piece of wood. I can feel it first. And I can tell you right now, it's not going to cut anything. But let's just try. We're going to try this side and we're going to try this side. Nothing's happening. So let's just advance the blade. We can even set the plane on the material and advance the blade. Now if I have just a little bit of adjustment to do, I don't mind if this is locked down. If I've got a lot of adjustment to do, sometimes I'll release this and adjust it forward. Let's just adjust it like this until the blade starts engaging, little bit more adjusting it like this until that blade just catches. See. Just bring it forward just a little bit more until that blade-- there it is. See it's starting to cut. Now we've got to adjust it. So I've started with the blade back and then I've brought it forward until it starts cutting. What a lot of people tend to do is they set the blade too deep. And then they try to plane and it won't cut. Number one though, you've got to make sure that the blade is razor sharp. Please refer to the video on sharpening a plane, because we go over the entire process of sharpening a plane. Extremely important that blade is sharp. So now that we've got some depth, let's feel it with our thumb. What I'm doing is I'm taking my thumb and I'm running it like this. If I ran it to the side, I'd slice my thumb. We're running it across like this. And that seems to me that the lateral adjustment is pretty good, but let's test. What I'm going to do is I'm going to plane on this side of the plane, and then all the way over on this side of the plane. That's going to adjust the lateral adjustment. Now, let's test it on the wood. So I'm going to start over here. You'll notice too what I'm doing the edge of the board, that I don't put my hand on top of the front tote. What I'll do is I'll put my thumb right here and my finger right on the side. That it helps to guide the plane in along. The other thing you'll notice too is when I hold the rear tote, I never put four fingers in the plane. This makes for a very uncomfortable grip. And you will develop blisters very fast if you're planing for a long. So you've got to make sure three fingers are in the plane and one finger is out. I've even put my pinkie out for a more relaxed grip, especially if this tends to be a little bit smaller right in here. So I'm planing this side here. So I plane there. And you can see and hear that we're barely taking anything off-- very, very fine. Now let's plane over here. You can see this is much heavier over there. So the lateral adjustment needs to be adjusted, because it's cutting more on one side than it is on the other. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take and just push the lateral adjustments slightly towards the side that more is coming off on. Again, let's feel with our thumb. Because what I want is I want to train my thumb to be able to feel the depth of cut and the lateral adjustments. I want to be able to feel what that shaving both looks like, sounds like, and actually is. So now we're going to cut o this side. The shaving is very nice, very paper thin there, and over on the side. So now the lateral adjustments is a little bit more. And we're just barely touching it. That's nice there. And that's perfect there. Look at that, both of which are exactly the same thickness. And you can tell by how translucent the actual shaving is. Now, I like the depth adjustment. That application is actually-- that depth is actually not something that you'll use on all applications. You may find that that depth is great for just smoothing up your material. But say you needed to take off a heavier shaving. Well, all you've got to do is advance the blade. Now you can hear it. It's taking off more of a shaving just by the sound. Hear that sound. If you want to take off more, there's even a heavier shaving. But I find for most work, with this plane, it's best that you take off a very fine shaving. I'm going to back it off now. Let's go back to our setting. We have very, very fine. We can advance it forward just a little bit. Maybe a little bit more. That's nice. Now once we've gone through the trouble of setting the lateral adjustment and the depth, the last thing I want to do is throw this plane on its side on the bench. This is something that I find a lot of people do. They tend to put the plane on the bench. And this is something that was learned in I believe in public schools when they were trying to teach children how to respect the tools, not to throw a sharp tool on top of another tool. The problem is, if you set it on the side like this, it both can adjust the lateral adjustment, throw it out of adjustment, and it also exposes the blade right here. If you are planing wood, and you set the plane on a clean bench like this, there's no trouble with this whatsoever. The blade is protected, the lateral adjustment is protected, and it makes for easy access when you need to pick it up and go back to your work. I want to show you what I do when I'm smoothing the surface of this board. Of course, you can't feel this in the video, but this has a little bit of a rough texture because it just came out of the planer, and planer knives are maybe a little bit dull. Sometimes you'll get ripples from the planer. So I'm going to smooth this up. So we'll do that in the tail vice. One thing to keep in mind when you're planing is grain direction. As I've mentioned in some of the other videos, wood is like a series of straws. Here they are. And the grain-- we can follow the grain like this. Now watch this grain line. It comes and it comes and it comes off the edge of the board like this. So imagine these series of straws like this. If I plane in this direction, we'll be fine. If I take and I plane in this direction, what happens? All of these straws are going to break like this. So I've got a plane in the direction of the grain. You can refer to it in the sense of petting the hair on your pet. You pet it with the grain. Plane in the direction of the grain. Sometimes it's difficult to tell which way the grain is going as when I'm planing the face of this board. I'm going to take a stab at it and look. I believe that the plane is going this way. But really, I won't be able to tell until I start planing. As soon as I plane I can start feeling the grain. Now, when I plane this, it's kind of skipping along. Very subtly, you can hear it. I'm starting from one end and working all the way to the other side. Wow. You can hear it. We're making a continuous stroke all the way across the board. So I started over here and worked this way. Now I'm working back this way. This is just silky, silky smooth. I might go one more pass across the board, putting a fair amount of pressure as I start the cut, right here on the front of the tote. Now the pressure is over the whole of the plane. A lot of pressure is down. As I exit the board, the pressure then is transferred to the back of the plane as I exit the board. What that does is it keeps me from ending up with a tapered board. That is just beautiful. This same exact technique works on hardwoods. I'm planing pine here. But I found when planing maple that it is helpful to have this type of plane. What makes a good plane or what makes a good tool is the sum of all of its parts. A plane, for example, has many, many parts. And the sum of all those parts working together is what makes a good tool. So buy the best you can afford, and sharpen up your plane iron, and enjoy your planing.

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