Gosh, how time flies!
Covering the digression on late Marples planes first, I was fairly surprised to see a plane like mine or Custard's (but with the common straight handle) sell on eBay for £95.88. Then again, it was mint, and with the original box. If you are feeling sad that you missed out, don't despair - the new owner has re-listed it with some nicer photos and a buy it now price of £225, so it will probably be available for a while. :roll:
Meanwhile, back in the workshop, I made a little bit of progress in cutting the bits to the right sizes.
Here I have the two ends, in the vice and in handscrews, so I could plane a straight, square face edge
That will do:
I marked the size while the two ends were together
then set the bevel gauge to 1:8 as per the drawing and knifed out the slanting cuts
Making a dovetailed box is an example of a job where the components do need to be accurately cut to size, since the ends become reference surfaces for marking the joints. That's why I wanted a knife cut here, not a pencil line.
To cut the other side parallel to the first is a job for a small panel gauge
Cut a groove for the saw
and then saw down, cutting the whole width at one go, so it's nice and straight
For the rip cuts, the simplest way is to use my little Burgess bandsaw and then plane back to the line, so that's what I did.
For the base and top, I needed to lose some wood from both edges, as there was some sapwood to be avoided - you can see here that it even has had some worm attack
so I reached for a marking gauge to get a line to cut to, only to notice that I had somehow embarked on a common technique for applying localised colour:
So I paused for a bit, and carried on again today.
Having cut the top and bottom to length and width, I thought I was ready to start on the dovetails, as shown on my original design.
Can you see where I have gone wrong?
It's a classic beginner's mistake - dovetails on side grain!
I had thought about this earlier on, really I had. I knew that I want a box which has been rolled 90 degrees, so what would normally be the lid becomes the front flap. One of my initial sketches had a note about it. But the real mistake was made weeks ago, when I was deciding how to fit the parts onto the glued-up boards, here:
- that trapezium should be rotated 90 degrees so the top and bottom go on the end grain.
Bother!
Frustrated at my blunder, I checked the original size of the glued-up board - it was too narrow as it was, but I could have exploited the slanting edge of the original wood, and glued two wider bits edge to edge. Instead, I thought of it as tidy wide boards, wide enough for the wrong layout, not the right one. (With hindsight, I could have cut out paper shapes, like a sewing pattern, and arranged them on my boards. If I had done that, I might have had the sense to mark the grain direction, like sewing patterns do for the warp and weft direction.)
So, I am now stuck with the grain orientation you see here. Short of making the ends from an ugly patchwork, I must use the bits I have.
I can see a few options but would welcome opinions and suggestions.
A) I could do the whole thing with butt or rebate joints.
B) I could have tongues on the long boards fitting into grooves in the ends.
C) I could have one row of dovetails only, on the back, with a plain butt or rebate on the top and bottom.
What would you do?
