Mitered dovetails

To hide the groove for the bottom, I decided to try a new – to me – technique. The bottom part will be mitered, while two regular dovetails holds everything together. This way, the groove will be hidden inside the miter.

I first marked the tail board, making sure to scribble the waste to avoid whoopsies.

I then sawed off the miter and cut the waste from between the tails, using a chisel.

Afterwards, I traced around the tails in order to make the pins. Here’s a neat trick: put a hand plane on its side at the vise and secure the board you are marking, in the vise. Move the plane in on the bench, and you have perfect support at exactly the right height while marking. And this is one of the VERY few occasions where placing a hand plane on its side, makes any sense!

Here’s how I got a perfect miter. I place the edge of my chisel in the knife line – I have sawed just shy off the line. I remove the ruler from my combination square, and pinch the chisel using the head stock of the square as a support. Dead on 90°! I then just chop down, almost to depth.

Afterwards I pare the rest of the waste off. And here’s the proof of the pudding: dead on 45° miter!

Apart from a slight whoopsie where I split out the groove (I glued it back in), this worked out great.

And this is just SO much fun to do!

To close the miters completely, I fettled the tails using my router plane:

Here’s how the miter looked before I fettled it into coherence:

And here are the parts for the box – ready for assembly!

I assembled everything dry to check that everything would go together without issues. I had to trim the rebate on the bottom slightly, but the rest was dead on perfect.

The last piece going in…

And assembled! There are a few differences in height on the tray sides, and that happened because I did not bother to make everything dead on – the plan was to tart it all up after glueup anyway. The thing is – you can be as accurate as you want while cutting your dovetails, but if things move even slightly there will be discrepancies. I therefore plan ahead and allow for that “after the fact tart-up”.

The bottom was perfectly flush, as expected since I used the groove for the bottom as reference when I laid out my dovetails.

A final pass with the smoother on the inside surfaces. Can’t do this later on…

With the inside of the sides nice and clean, I grabbed the glue bottle. Time for some frenzy – on the next page.