I feel a little silly posting this, splitting hairs again, but I’m curious about the tendancy or likelyhood of destroying a dovetail joint, and if the orientation of the dovetail makes a difference?
see the simplified picture… this is not a drawer front and side, but more of a case. I’d like to orient the dovetail like the picture marked ‘A:’ because I want to restrain the sides from blowing out. But does this orientation make it more likely that you could split the face piece? It looks to me like in either case, if you significantly tweak the side you’re going to split the face.
Do these two orientations have technical names?
thanks, and take care,
mike.
Replies
Since it's a case it won't matter which way the dovetails are oriented. A case is subject to stresses from both the front and the sides. The normal way to orient the joint is to cut the dovetail in the front piece and place it in the housing (groove) of the side piece.
If your carcase is held together with only one set of dovetails it won't matter.
As to the joint, there are dovetail housing joints which are some form of sliding dovetail. Dovetails and pins come in a varitey of configurations including blind, half blind and throughs.
Lee
Furniture Carver
Prospero has so screwed my account that the e-mail at the top will not work. If you need to e-mail me go through my website.
Mike, go with "B", but reverse the front and sides. You want half-pins to the outside to provide compressive force to the tails.
This way, if anything splits, an unlikely event, it would be the sides, not the face.
Lee in Cave Junction, Oregon
Gateway to the Oregon Caves
This forum post is now archived. Commenting has been disabled