Shooting Board and My First Dovetail Project

The shooting board was made by gluing up another panel as in the previous post about the subject, gluing and finish nailing them together, and nailing the fence on. I also applied some Ultra High Molecular Weight (slippery) tape to the part the plane rides on. It's very handy to have, it makes squaring up and fine tuning the length of boards much easier.





For my first dovetail project (I've cut a dozen dovetails before on scraps) I decided to go for a simple box that I can use to transport tools or the like. I started by cutting the stock to length, shooting the ends, and removing the tongues on the long edges (these boards came to me ship-lapped). To remove the tongues I split/cut them off with a knife, then planed the edges square.

After that, I marked off the baselines with my knife marking gauge. Next step was to lay out the tails, not that it did me much good. I think I hit the line twice on the whole box. They still work fine, but they don't look as nice.


Saw, coping saw, then chisel to the baseline.

You can see the advantage to using a marking gauge with a knife on this soft pine in these pins. The baselines look fine once the joint is assembled, but if you look at the endgrain, you can see that it's all torn up.

I started losing my patience trying to get the edges of the bottom boards to match up so I could glue them into a panel and set the bottom inside the frame. I ended up just nailing the boards to the bottom with some cut nails that I saved when I helped pull out an old hardwood floor over a year ago.



When I was cutting the pins on the first end board, I cut to the wrong side of the line so they are very sloppy. I corrected the issue on the other end, but they still aren't spectacular. The nailed-on bottom and a couple of judiciously placed finish nails have the whole thing more-or-less ship shape. It's good enough to lug some hammers around in anyways.