Travel Tool Chest & Workbench Build Process
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Posted 19th February 2023
It occurred to me that, before I mark the pins, it would be a good idea to check how square my saw cuts had been:
Most were good, but one needed tweaking, so I'm glad I did it!
With that, I was happy to call the tails done:
Next up was clamping the bottom board (I'd deliberately chosen to do one of the bottom corner joints first as it would be less visible than the top ones!). Rather than line it up to be flush with the side of my plane, I lined it up to be square with the bench and at about the right height for the plane. That was intended to compensate for any out-of-squareness of the end of the bottom board. Obviously if it were a long way out of square then the marked-up pins would be in the wrong place, but I don't think even I can saw badly enough for that effect to be significant!
It was then back to my faithful ruler trick, this time using a 300 mm long ruler rather than the usual 150 mm one:
After applying some masking tape to the end of the bottom board, the tail board got flipped over and pushed up to the bottom board until the ruler was in contact all the way along and the back face of each board was aligned:
After squaring the lines up from the base board with the end of a ruler:
Then saw:
and saw:
then chop, this time with the 16 mm chisel doing most of the work and the 18 mm one taking the final cuts (as a lazy alternative to sharpening the 16 mm one).
It didn't go together straight away and needed a bit of tweaking on two of the pins (one of which I can blame on my other half wandering over and talking to me while I was sawing it!). However, after not much time, the first joint is together. It took a bit of work with the persuading stick to come together so I suspect it's a little on the tight side (to allow for glue), but I'm pretty happy with it for the first go at a dovetail joint in 20 mm ish thick stock without my dovetail saw guide making it easy.
You can see what I mean about going a bit over the top with overhang allowance in this image:
Page 25 of 144
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