Plowing the groove

A groove is needed for the bottom, and that means that my plow plane comes out. In this case it was already set up from the butt chisel rack. I took a short swipe at the end, and set my Veritas marking gauges up to match their respective sides of the groove to be.

By scoring the lines, any tearout is avoided. This was especially important here, because the grain direction changes along the board. It did work – sort of. Some really problematic areas did tear out on me, but nothing really major.

My Stanley #50 combination plane made short work of plowing the grooves. It is a good plane, but it is too finicky and cumbersome to set up right, and the overall “fit and finish” leaves a lot to be desired. In time, I want to replace it with something better. Until then, it works great once set up.

For the most part I managed just fine, but aside from I said – I got some tearout because of the wild grain around the knots.

I’ll say this, though: plowing this groove was FAST! Using the router table would not have been any more efficient, that’s for sure!

Mitered dovetails

Since I feel that my life could use a bit of complications, I decided to make double mitered dovetails. On the chisel rack I did a miter on one side, but I wanted to try on both sides. This is not going to be perfect at all, but it is a first. And it is shop infrastructure, it does not have to be perfect.

After laying out the dovetails, I sawed to the lines and created knife walls to ensure crispness.

“The 140 trick” is a known method of ensuring gapless corners on the inside of dovetail joints. The trick got its name because people used the Lie-Nielsen No. 140 – their copy of the vintage Stanley 140 skew block plane. It has a removable side so that the blade extends all the way to the edge of the side of the plane, just like the shoulder plane pictured earlier on.

I have looked for a Lie-Nielsen #140 for a loooong time, but none has shown up. And here in Norway – or the whole of Scandinavia for that matter – no stores has had one in stock for ages. There has been talk about it “coming in the near future” for years, so I gave up.

In stead, I ordered this little gem from Veritas: their skew block plane:

The major difference from a LN #140, is that it does not come with a removable side piece. It is always open on one side (I am right handed, so I bought a right handed version) – but it does come with a fence (like the #140)! Which is a rather important detail, but I’m not going into full details here. Read the review for that.

I set the fence to match the width of the dovetails and planed a small rebate. No more than about 1/32” or .8mm deep:

Here’s a shot from the other side – the plane comes with a scoring wheel, but I had already scored the line with the marking gauge so I just swiffa-swoffa’ed.

My shoulder plane cleaned up a slight discrepancy due to the Veritas plane being new to me.

To check my work, I grabbed my router plane. Only a tiny sliver on one of the corners needed to be removed.

Here’s the result – perfect, gapless joint:

A whoopsie…

Every project needs a whoopsie. If not for something else, so to keep you on your toes and remind you that you might be good – but not perfect!

I started choppin’, but chopped the tail instead of the waste! 😱

Oh, well. I stopped before I came half way through – and THANKFULLY it was on the inside – so nobody will ever know about this once the joint is glued.

Nobody…

Oh, well. Cats don’t particularly enjoy being trapped in bags, so better just let them out.

Next page please!