Dovetail Template

Christmas, for me, came early this year with the purchase of several items. These items were necessary if I were to continue my cabinet building hobby. We will look at each of these items in separate blog entries, so stay tuned.

The kitchen we were working on upstairs next needs to have some drawers built and I would like to gain some experience building them with dovetail corners; something I have never done before. I also want to build drawers for my new workbench, a future desk for my office and possible entrainment center in the living room. This should provide blog material for years to come when I am home from China or anyplace else the Lord might take me.

A dovetail template is a device used to hold two corner pieces in place and guides the router in cutting the joint. Today we will look at the template and when I return from some vacation time in Arizona we will learn how to use it, I hope.

I shopped around and realized these templates were not readily available in stores where tools are sold. I finally found one in a Sears store and felt for the price it would meet my needs. That same day I picked up two more items, one at Sears and the other at Lowe's. One of those had to be returned and replaced, but that is another story.

The picture below shows the box the template came in. The little picture on the box shows how it will be used and the second picture shows the results. I have to learn how to do that and humbly share with you what I learned.

Since I gave the gift to myself it wasn't wrapped and there was nobody to watch me open it and to thank for giving it to me. This is kind of a self centered Christmas if you ask me. God gave his Son, Jesus Christ, for us so that we could receive the gift of salvation from him. Here I am giving things to myself.

I opened the box and laid out the pieces.

I put all the pieces together; well almost all. There were these two three pointed pieces and three screws. I knew what they were for and knew that I had a fairly big problem. The two pieces are guides that attach to the router and are used to guide the router bit to form the dovetail joint. One is to be used with a dovetail bit with a quarter inch shank and the other with a one eighth inch shank. I knew they would not work on my router and in fact wouldn't work on most new routers. More on that later.

I took the template out to the shop to the workbench and clamped it down. I then realized it would be better to cut a three quarter inch piece to attach the template to and then attach with clamps the piece to the bench. That wood base would protect the template and result in a more secure attachment to the bench. When I can get to my table saw I will cut the piece required.

With the template one can cut three kinds of joints: flush, offset and rabbeted. We will be making flush joints. Maybe I should say, "I will be making flush joints and you will be watching." I think I have the harder job. Does that seem fair?

As I look ahead in the operator's manual, I can see it will take some time to learn how to do this well. More on that later. Now it is time to go out for some exercise.