What is the best wood to practice Hand cut dovetails

[frugal]

Ok, I have been trying to hand cut a few dovetails and my results so far look like I have tried to feed the wood through the garden chipper

I started on oak as I had some spare off-cuts lying around, but the consensus seems to be that oak is too hard to be good for practicing.

I bought a couple of pieces of sycamore from Yandles after DC said that it was a good wood to practice planing with. However my dovetails are appalling.

What sort of wood do people suggest for practicing with?

How thick should the wood be? The current wood is about 5/8ths Is thicker better, or is thinner better?

 

[bugbear]

I'd aim for pieces around 5" wide, 1/2" thick, in the cheapest mahogany timber you can find e.g. sapele or similar.

BugBear

 

[Karl]

I'd just keep practising on what you've got - maybe a combi of one piece Oak, one piece Sycamore.

If you get good at that, i'd then try it with both parts Oak.

I'm about to do a similair exercise myself - got loads of Oak & Beech offcuts in the garage to practise on.

Cheers

Karl

 

[Paul Chapman]

Hi frugal,

I would suggest something with a fairly closed grain, so that you can get nice clean cuts, but not too hard. I had a session with Rob (Woodbloke) recently and we used Beech. That was nice, closed grain wood but quite hard so paring the wood by hand was quite hard work. Like BB, I would suggest some sort of Mahogany-type wood like Sapele would be a good choice, although it depends what you have lying about in the workshop.

Make sure your chisels are sharp :wink:

Cheers :wink:

Paul

 

[lurker]

To go off at a slight tangent;

Yesterday, I wanted to cut a few simple DTs; I used a saw I'd been using to practice sharpening and the flaming cut was like a banana ( None EEC approved). I tried several times - same result. Much bad language ensued

Then I used a saw sharpened by an expert and it cut dead straight with hardly any effort on my part.

Ther moral being - its sometimes OK to blame your tools ( or in this case my inability to set a saw). My guess is I've put too much set on one side.

If the saw is rubbish then no amount of practice will help.

 

[nellist]

Start out with a light coloured timber.easier to see pencil and knife marks.These tend to get lost in the darker woods.

 

[Tusses]

cheap pine (white wood)

if you are not accurate with your cutting, you can still 'whack' the joints together because the wood is soft

Thats what I cut my teeth on anyway

 

[mr]

if you are not accurate with your cutting, you can still 'whack' the joints together because the wood is soft

Thats what I cut my teeth on anyway

Doesn't that rather defeat the point ? IMHO cheap white wood is one of the hardest types of wood to work with.

Cheers Mike

 

[Tusses]

if you are not accurate with your cutting, you can still 'whack' the joints together because the wood is soft

Thats what I cut my teeth on anyway

Doesn't that rather defeat the point ? IMHO cheap white wood is one of the hardest types of wood to work with.

Cheers Mike

?? dunno ?? thats what I leaned on. I made boxes for all my tools .. still using them now