The Sliding Till

It's been awhile since I've made dovetails, but I've studied a bunch recently so I felt confident in going for it.

This is for a little till that will slide on runners just under the bench lid.

Orient the boards as they'll be joined and mark them so you don't get mixed up.

I forgot to take photos of measuring and marking out and cutting the tails.  I'll go into detail in a future post about the process of cutting dovetails by hand.  For now, just know that this is the best set of dovetails I've cut so far.  :-)

Marking the pin locations.

Clamping the pin board in my wagon vise to prevent any potential splitting during assembly.

Very tight fit.  Almost scary tight.  I've never done this in white oak before.

I think these are also the narrowest pins I've made.

I've decided I should buy a real dovetail saw.  I've been using a Veritas Rip Carcass Saw with 12tpi (teeth per inch) which I thought was close enough to the 14tpi of a normal dovetail saw that it wouldn't make much difference and wasn't worth the purchase.  But white oak is a lot harder and denser than the softer stuff I've been using lately.  My rip carcass saw was hard to start and had a tendency to chatter and left a rough surface on the sides of the tails.  My crosscut carcass saw is 14tpi and it feels a lot smoother in the cut than this rip saw.  So now I just need to decide if I want the Veritas, Lie-Nielsen or Bad Axe.