Is anyone interested in cutting dovetail joints?

[Ger21]

Yep i'm up for it Gerry I've played a little in the past with dovetails but would be nice to have program to make life easy. Would be nice not to have to mess around with leigh dovetail jig for one off jobs.

I though you only cut aluminum? Or is it aluminium over there??

If you have a fixture on your machine to hold the stock, you can be ready to cut an infinite variety of dovetails in just a few minutes.


I'm currently writing a manual and getting the business end set up, and hope to start offering it for sale in a few more months.

[JAZZCNC]

I though you only cut aluminum? Or is it aluminium over there??

If you have a fixture on your machine to hold the stock, you can be ready to cut an infinite variety of dovetails in just a few minutes.


I'm currently writing a manual and getting the business end set up, and hope to start offering it for sale in a few more months.

Nope I cut everything from card board to cast iron on it but actually my machine started life as a wood router and was designed from the begining to extend past the bed for cutting hinges into doors and dove tails etc.! . . . . . Not a lot of people know this but my grand father used to work for Robert Thompson (Mouse Man) so I grew up working wood taught by master crafts man and I used to have successful bespoke furniture/Cabinet business . . I just got sick to the back teeth of whinging whining customers so closed shop and changed directions.!

Now I just make dust for my own pleasure and it's great to say No to Ex-customers "You should have thought about that when you whined and tried to screw me into ground on price.!!"

Post when your ready and I'll be along to part with a few beer tokens.!

[EddyCurrent]

Gerry,
like this

[Ger21]

That's a very poor joint that I would never recommend. Too much end grain to end grain.

Also, cutting joints like that with a router in solid woods is always problematic, as the wood will tend to chip where the bit exits the cut.
That's also an issue in the wood joints you PM'd me about. Cutting a lot of those joints in solid wood is very difficult, unless you are starting with an oversized stock in both length and width, to allow trimming off the chipped edges.

[EddyCurrent]

I was thinking about a loose tongue now, similar to a biscuit but full width and shaped like the joint, probably plywood, that eliminates the end grain issue.
The grooves in the end of the boards could be cut with a T slot cutter so they all lie flat on the table. but . . .



With regard to the other cnc joints, I would never make them myself and you are correct about oversize, I like to take at least one shaving off with a sharp hand plane.

[magicniner]

There's an application out there somewhere that uses tapered (pointed) cutters with the work at a shallow angle allowing a huge variety of conventional and unconventional dovetails to be cut on quite long workpieces.
From what I recall it's capable of the forms you can only otherwise create with a saw & chisel, i.e. blind dovetails with sharp corners and flat bottoms in the pockets.

- Nick

[Ger21]

There's an application out there somewhere that uses tapered (pointed) cutters with the work at a shallow angle allowing a huge variety of conventional and unconventional dovetails to be cut on quite long workpieces.

Tailmaker - http://tailmaker.net/

But it does not make real dovetails joints.