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I asked for input on a dovetail jig I'm designing in this thread. There was lots of thoughtful input for which I am thankful. I've gotten the design to the point where I was ready to make the "beta" version so here is what I've done so far.
Construction was out of 3/4" (er, 18mm) Baltic Birch plywood. First built the base - glued. Was going to use screws also but it is pretty solid so I skipped that. A few pix of that. Next made the platen for holding the dovetail fingers. Sorry, no pix of the platen but you can see the whole assembly in the next photo.
Then I made the fingers out of 3/8" Lexan. Used a diamond tip scribe to write some info on the fingers. Also scribed the "nominal cut line" though needed to press harder, the line a hard to see. That's what "betas" are all about...
After a lot of fiddling with different fasteners to mount the fingers on the T-Track, I was ready to give it a try. Unfortunately, what I though was 7 degree dovetail bit was actually a 7.5 degree bit so I no tails cut today but I was able to cut pins with a straight bit. Used some scrap BB and you can see that I should have used a backer to prevent chipout. Especially for plywood. But, it seems to do what I want. Note I already biffed a finger with the router bit. You can see it in the second to last photo. Bad phil.
Lot more to do. I learned a lot of things in the process and am feeding them back into the design. One thing I learned is how utterly unstandardized T-Tracks and their associated nuts are. Longer story there, perhaps for another day.
Construction was out of 3/4" (er, 18mm) Baltic Birch plywood. First built the base - glued. Was going to use screws also but it is pretty solid so I skipped that. A few pix of that. Next made the platen for holding the dovetail fingers. Sorry, no pix of the platen but you can see the whole assembly in the next photo.
Then I made the fingers out of 3/8" Lexan. Used a diamond tip scribe to write some info on the fingers. Also scribed the "nominal cut line" though needed to press harder, the line a hard to see. That's what "betas" are all about...
After a lot of fiddling with different fasteners to mount the fingers on the T-Track, I was ready to give it a try. Unfortunately, what I though was 7 degree dovetail bit was actually a 7.5 degree bit so I no tails cut today but I was able to cut pins with a straight bit. Used some scrap BB and you can see that I should have used a backer to prevent chipout. Especially for plywood. But, it seems to do what I want. Note I already biffed a finger with the router bit. You can see it in the second to last photo. Bad phil.
Lot more to do. I learned a lot of things in the process and am feeding them back into the design. One thing I learned is how utterly unstandardized T-Tracks and their associated nuts are. Longer story there, perhaps for another day.
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