Woodworker's Journal 2009-33-6, страница 48

Tool Review

Dovetailing Outside the Box

By Chris Marshall

Are clamp-in, template style jigs the only way to make beautiful dovetails? With plenty of practice, you can learn to do it by hand — or perhaps one of these nontraditional jigs could be your ticket.

Bringing perfect dovetails into your woodworking arsenal is one of the top goals of most of the home woodworkers I know. Generally, there are two approaches to making them: using hand tools or a "clamp-in" style template jig and a router. This second approach has plenty of fans, and there are a number of popular router jig systems available on the market. Personally, I've had my struggles with some of them (readjusting bit depth, tweaking template offsets and making other adjustments to arrive at the right combination for a satisfactory joint).

There are, however, other styles of dovetail jigs available to use with your router and, as a frequent attendee of woodworking shows, I've seen most of them demonstrated. Watching someone who's made

Prazi

ChestMate $99

Versatile and modestly priced, this jig makes variable-spaced through dovetails and much more, www.praziusa.com (800) 262-0211

For more info on the web: use our

Xquik-LINK

hundreds of dovetails with their jig move effortlessly through the routine, I thought, isn't the same as getting one of these units in the shop, setting it up and making some pins and tails with no help from the expert.

So, in the hopes of finding a better mousetrap, I pushed the usual jigs aside and tried out these six unique alternatives. I'm glad I did: there are some smart solutions here that make dovetailing easy and even fun! You'll see that there's a huge price spread, but I didn't let that derail this test. Repeatability, accuracy and ease of use were my main concerns, regardless of price. Turns out, there's a good jig for most any budget. Here are my impressions — and my favorite.

ChestMate Dovetail Jig

For $99, Prazi's ChestMate jig will enable you to cut through dovetail joints on stock of any width, in any spacing you choose. That's because this jig employs a pair of interchangeable inserts — one for pins and another for tails — that follow a scrap template pattern you create on the table saw. A tab under each insert fits into a series of shallow saw kerfs you cut in the template to create your own joint layout. It's an ingenious approach that guarantees the pins ^ and tails will register - „• properly while giving

you plenty of fir ~ creative control.

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December 2009 Woodworker's Journal