Travel Tool Chest & Workbench Build Process
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Posted 19th February 2023
After trimming & planing the middle board (no photos, but some of you will be pleased to hear I sawed both ends with the hand saw!), I decided there were no further excuses available and it was time to start cutting dovetails.
I started by digging out an offcut of oak and marking it up as a "story stick":
There are three (labelled) knife marks: one for a reference position and one for each of the inside dimensions of the box. There are also some pencil marks to give a vague idea of where the ends of the boards should be:
I was feeling paranoid (for which read: untrusting of how square my sawing had been), so I decided to make the tails stick out quite a long way. It'll probably be too much to plane off, but I can always use a flush cut saw to get them somewhere close before planing. Hopefully I won't regret that later on!
I used the story stick to transfer knife marks onto the rear end of the inside faces of each piece. I then used a square and a 600 mm ruler to transfer the marks along the inside faces.
As I was working on the assumption that the ends weren't square, I needed to mark the dovetails from the base line rather than the end. I realise that the angle isn't that critical so I could have just eyeballed it, but I'm very new to cutting dovetails without a crutch saw guide, so every little helps.
To give me a way to mark them from the baseline, the 3D printer kindly spent 36 minutes making this:
The boards are two wide for the "Moxon" end of my portable workbench, so I clamped them to the normal bench with the vice and a dog hole clamp thing. That made it easy to transfer the marks across the end with a square and cross-out the waste:
To give myself the best chance of something nearing accurate sawing, I tilted the board over such that the lines were vertical.
It was then just a case of taking a deep breath and attacking it with the Dozuki...
... and the fret saw:
It then got rotated by 90° and (with a slightly longer clamp holding it in place), the ends could be sawn:
My 12 mm chisel did most of the work of chopping out the waste, with the 16 mm one coming out for the final cuts.
Page 24 of 144
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