I see that Chris Schwarz is updating his book about the tool chest. I remember when that book came out - I went hook, line & sinker and made a tool chest for several reasons. One peripheral reason was to learn once & for all how to cut dovetails. Not the be-all & end-all dovetails, but to learn how to cut them consistently and accurately. And I got that just by cutting a bunch of them. Made several boxes as a warm up, then made that chest & a smaller version.
My recent carving series on strapwork patterns includes a 30 minute slideshow of some of the design’s history.
(the link for that series https://vimeo.com/ondemand/follansbeestrapwork )
One piece of furniture that’s not in that slideshow is a box in a church in Devon that I’ve only seen in some snapshot photographs. A box that’s not oak. A box that’s dovetailed not rabbeted. (thanks to Paul Fitzsimmons & Jon Bayes for the photos of the Devon box) Here it’s sitting on top of another piece of furniture.
I don’t know what wood it is - but there are some reports of walnut being used in some of this large body of work. An incredibly high style cupboard from the Victoria & Albert Museum features imported hardwood from Central America called “bulletwood” - or Massaranduba (Manilkara bidentata). I looked under my bench & I had no bulletwood. But I did have some leftover Spanish cedar (Cedrela odorata). Though technically a hardwood, the wood is pretty soft. A relative of mahogany, it’s a funny wood. Sometimes ring-porous, sometimes interlocked fibers like the mahogany. Time to make a dovetailed strapwork box like the one in Devon. Something like it anyway. The Devon box has an extra feature on the dovetails - the top (& maybe the bottom) edge of the box is mitered.
So I gave it a shot. I had heard of full-blind mitered dovetails, which seemed like a pain in the ass to me. But this was new to me. Or, if I had seen it before, I’d forgotten it. I was focused on this view - under the lid, behind that molded cleat - you can just make out the straight cut that leaves the half pin/half tail combo that then gets mitered.
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