Every night I’m out here making dovetails, woohoo!

For those of you not of a certain age, that’s a TV reference: The theme song from DuckTales, a cartoon that aired from 1987 to 1990. As you may be able to guess, I’m not a typical student—I work at Rice, and am taking BIOE 555 to expand my making skills. I know my way around a modern wood shop pretty well but have done very little work with traditional techniques. For our “create a crate” project, I decided to incorporate a beautiful and functional joining method: hand-cut dovetails. As they look particularly good with high contrast, I picked up two types of wood at the store that compliment one another in such a configuration: Maple and Sapele (a wood similar in appearance to Mahogany but much more sustainable).

Acquiring the sapele and maple gave me a tangible starting point, but the S2S (surfaced two sides lumber) from the store was too thick for my tastes—just shy of an inch each. My first task, therefore, was re-sawing the boards. Unfortunately, both OEDK band saws were insufficient. One lacked enough throat capacity for even my narrowest board, the other lacked enough rigidity for straight cuts. My next attempt was to use the wood vise and saw by hand, but the saw was dull and maple is hard! 20 minutes with three different saws got me about a third of the way through my first piece so I ended up using the table saw in two passes (top half and bottom half) to split the board.

After re-sawing the first piece, it needed to be cleaned up. The planer was struggling with the material, visibly flexing and stalling on passes of barely 1/64th”. On a hunch, I disassembled the planer. The blades were a mess. I cleaned out compacted sawdust and also flipped its blades to a sharper side.

I did a glue-up of a set of full thickness boards (which would become the front panel) to make it wide enough with the grain orientation I was after for eventual dovetails. After the glue dried, I put the whole panel through the planer to clean it up, ending up with a final thickness of 18mm. The resawn maple boards I planed down to 9mm to be used for the top and bottom of the box.

For the sapele, Joe G. allowed me to use the machine shop’s ancient and much more capable band saw to cut my sapele board, and it handled the 7″ wide board without issue. A thorough cleanup later, it was free of any sawdust, which isn’t typically appreciated in a machine shop.

I did a glue-up of the sapele; once it dried, I gathered it and the maple and made table saw cuts as needed to square and size all faces.

Much of my time went to measuring and drawing to plan the dovetail design—first in SolidWorks, and then with a pencil on the actual wood. As I was cutting the dovetails by hand, I chose a spacing that divided evenly but didn’t match any “standard” patterns: 9mm at the narrow point of the pins, and 22mm at the matching part of the tails.

The majority of the actual box-making time was spent carefully cutting dovetails with a thin-kerf Japanese pull saw, chisels, and coping saw.

In cutting and adjusting the dovetails, the importance of appropriate work-holding became readily apparent: the large boards would twist in the vise jaws, and overhanging the table enough to use corner clamps caused terrible chatter and shifting with even light pressure. I ended up using multiple clamps on the table saw and still needed to contort to make remotely accurate cuts.

The first set of dovetail joints was so tight that it needed extensive fiddling here and there with chisels, as well as coaxing with a hammer (I used a scrap board to avoid marring the wood).

After the practice on the first set of dovetails, the second set connected firmly and without such a fight.

A light pass with the random orbital sander cleaned up the joints, and gave a beautiful smooth finish.

Finally, I arranged the remaining pieces and glued the rest of my 5-sided box together, securing it with clamps and painter’s tape while it dried.

For the moment the crate is 12″ x 28″ x 6.25″ but in the future I plan to split it into two 12″ x 14″ halves that will sit inside a cubby in a yet-to-be-built office shelf, able to be pulled out and expand to give easy access to a selection of hand tools I plan to store in it. Once those modifications are done, I will likely give it a tung oil finish.

Counting only the time working on the box and not finding and repairing equipment this was still a slow process. In a production environment even with hand tools there would be jigs and fixtures, so I would expect a dramatic reduction in time from what I took, not even accounting for the extra time it took me to learn. Still, quite a bit more expensive than a simple 1×4 pine crate.

Cost Type	Cost	Price	Source	Quantity	Total
Materials	Maple	$5.99/BF	Rockler	2.5 BF	$14.96
	Sapele	$6.99/BF	Rockler	1.5 BF	$10.48
	Coping Saw Blade	$12 per 18 pk	Home Depot	1	$0.66
	Titebond II Glue	$10 / 16 oz	Home Depot	1 oz	$0.62
Labor	Woodworking Operator	$20/hr	Indeed	4 hr	$80
	Prototyping Engineer (You!)	$60/hr	OoI rate	8 hr	$480
Overhead	Facility Cost (Machine Time)	15%	Rockler	–	$88.08
	Quality Control	$17/hr	Indeed	.5 hr	$8.50
Design	Engineering and Development	$60/hr	OoI	3 hr	$180
	Iterations	2			$180
Misc.	Waste and Scrap	20% of supplies	Wood Whisperer		$5.35

 

Total: $1048.65