Saturday, October 13, 2012
Use Dividers for Quick, Easy & Perfect Dovetail Layout
popularwoodworking.com: I’m in the midst of making a place to put my woodworking stuff, a la Christopher Schwarz’s “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.” The picture at left shows my dire need for just such a receptacle. (And it perhaps also shows a need to cull my collection.)
It’s the same chest build Chris is teaching to a full house of students right now at Roy Underhill‘s The Woodwright’s School in Pittsboro, N.C., and although we started on the same day, as Chris’s blog reveals, the students are well ahead of me. (I’m guessing they’ve had fewer meetings to attend in the last few days.)
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3 comments:
Every time I write a comment in response to a Popular Wooodworking article, D.Boevers makes fun of me. So be it. I probably deserve it, I AM awfully unforgiving to them.
BUT:
I know I've said it before here and I'll say it again: While there probably isn't much in common with furniture craftsmanship and scenery construction [there's simply no reason we need to use something like dividers in the vast majority of theatre scenery construction], one thing that I DO believe can firmly straddle both sides of the fence here is LAYOUT. The clearer & more precise you strive to be in your marking and cutting of materials, the better your end product is likely to be.
AND, if you know how to "turn on" the precision when needed, the more often you'll be able to turn it back off when precision isn't required of a project. One place I know this level of precision can be necessary is laying out steel for machining or a lot of metalwork *cough, cough*ANGELS!
All that said, I doubt we'll be seeing dividers in the scene shop very soon or very often. That's not the point here, what IS important is that learning quick and accurate and PRECISE layout is useful and it is something we don't focus on very often but definitely should.
I love the simplicity of this. The one and only time I made a dove tails was for a joinery project two years ago. It came out very nice once I sanded of the wood putty. Like how this is done with no tape measure. How Amish is that. When I repeat Scenic Fabrication and Install I will totally try this. I also like how Jacob said know when to turn the precision on and off. I am not sure what he was saying about the metal for angels. I will have to ask the Job Lead of that show about that.
This is really cool, and i like how precise it is, but i dont really see how this is something new or why we dont use it in the shop be cause this is the exact same thing we use when we are drafting and trying to make a certain polygon or want equal spaces for something. The tool she used to help her mark her lines was really interesting, ive never seen anything like that and it seems much more effective than trying to eyeball it or trying to go back and measure across the side to see how seep your angle should be, im not sure what that tool is called but it seems to prevent quite a lot of human error.
I think dividers should be used more often though due to how exact they can be for an infinite number of times where as when marking from a measuring tape repeatedly there is a pretty high chance for error, but even a small one, as DR has taught us can make for very large problems later on in your project.
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