Making Woodland Furniture The Dove Tail Joint Lash

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Dave Canterbury, David Canterbury, The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

well guys I'm Dave Canterbury with a fighter school and what I want to discuss this morning in the green wood worker series is a little bit about a dovetail joint well we're going to lash this dovetail joint so I'm going to show you what I call the dovetail lash now I'm getting ready to build a chair sooner or later you're going to want to build some type of furniture it's great to be able to make spoons and bowls and all of those types of camp cooking implements and we show you how to do that in past videos but you also are going to want sooner or later in a longer-term scenario to be able to build furniture all along the Appalachian frontier they built what was called twig or stick furniture and most of the time that furniture was actually nailed together or it was jointed together was some type of a mortise and tenon around ten and a round mortise hole that was pressed into and those things would have been drilled out but before they had the availability in small rural areas of being able to make those mortise and tenon joints by having auger type bits and things like that they can also have used nails which were fairly cheap back in that period of the 1800s you're talking a three penny nail meant that that nail cost three pennies for a hundred nails nails were in full production by the mid 1800s so they began to get more affordable to rural people's so a 16 penny nail would have been 16 pennies for 100 nails so a lot of this twig furniture was nailed together what we're going to do today is assuming a more woodland type environment where we're not carrying a lot of tools with us or carrying you know five or six pounds of nails we're going to have to lash these things together so what we're going to do is we're going to build this chair with what I call a dovetail notch and a dovetail lash I'm going to show you that today so I'm using a tulip poplar wood here and I'll cut myself to four foot sections in to two foot sections and these are going to be my four legs everything else will be cut at two foot so basically I've harvested Center seven tulip poplar saplings I'm bringing them in here to my tail box just dropping them in the tail vise measuring them off and marking them so we're going to have to have the measuring for that I use my axe handle it's marked out in one inch increments as I'm cutting these two foot pieces I can use my axe to mark this out with but what I've done is since I'm back to the shop is I've marked two feet on my bench described a straight line across here so that I know right here at these tale vices from here to here is two foot and I can measure everything out very easily that way scribe a line on it with my knife or my belt line lock it in and pull out the good old bucks off now I'm gonna need to cut several of these so it's much easier just to set up a jig like this where I know the measurement that can lay it down and I can mark it and I can do the same thing with a parse of log with a v-notch cut in it and then I can put a straight line and a 45-degree line in it and I'll have a miter box made in the woods from around log with a beat chunk cut out that I could just lay these pieces down into and know that this cuts at 24 inches to straight cut in the law just like a miter box drop this down into the beat cut it off line it up every time at the end cut it off very simple way to make a jig in the woods if I eat okay so let's talk about this joint real quick we've got two front legs here that are going to have to have a cross support between them here so I have the two front legs with something in between them here and the chair will be about this wide when we're done okay this is where the dovetail notch comes in and the lashing if we're not going to bore holes into our woods okay my two largest diameter pieces that I have are going to be my two front legs and again we talked about we have to put a support in between those legs so we've got to choose which one of these is going to be our support at the top and it needs to be fairly thick we're going to be sitting on it so we're going to use something like this one here across the top and this width is important now I've already got a line marked on the bench here that I could slide these up against and give myself a space here so I'm going to take advantage of that space and use that as a center line for my dovetail joints so now what I want to do is I want to take this piece of wood and cut a dovetail joint initially a dovetail on both ends of this and then I'll match it up to a notch I'm gonna use up the locking marker here so that you can kind of see what I'm doing but what I want is I want a flat here on one side and then I want basically a triangle here just like this so I'm gonna cut this into a triangle piece of wood for the most part with the widest side of that triangle at the bottom so it's not an equal triangle it's gonna be a bit a little bit off and this will be the back waist side and I want that notch or that tenon to be at least as deep as my notch is going to be in a little bit deeper so that I can pound it in and then lash it tight and trim it if I need to but I'm better off getting a tight fit off the bat because I'm trying to keep everything the same size and that's going to be important here in a few minutes so what we're going to do is we're going to take our saw and we're just going to cut along the end grain just like this and I really don't want to go down any thicker than this piece of wood is so what I can do is I can lay this piece of wood right here and scribe a line on here at the bottom so I know about how deep to go with my cut and I'll probably go just a little bit short of that I'm doing all this in marker so you guys can kind of see what I'm doing and I'm using a regular drive whip blade Baca wood blade here on purpose because that's what I would have in the woods alright so I'm pretty even there now I'm going to come over to this side and I'm going to cut the other corner and I'm trying to stay right against this meat line right here in the front just like that okay now I have two lines cut in here so now I have a line coming down here and a line coming down here and now I'm gonna cut one across the back that's going to start by touching both of those lines and go down the same death right down that cut just like that okay that's pretty simple stuff now if I just take my marker and connect the dots here basically to my dropped lines and cut away the waste by batani my knife since we're not using a chisel right now I'm going with what we would have and we're just going to baton those out and we'll have a notch or a tenon when we're done and then we'll have to cut the mortise to match this tenant okay so now I'm just gonna come in here with my knife and chop away the waste just inside the line there's one good there's two there's three and now I have a triangle here that's going to be my dovetail going into my other piece and you can see I'm just a little bit off right here in depth don't worry too much about that

you can trim that down with your knife with a sheer cut to get it evened up but that's a pretty clean dovetail now we need one of these on the other end before we can make our mortise joints in the other pieces now one of the really important things we have to remember is we want the alignment of this and this to be straight and you can eyeball that pretty well and see if it's straight you could always pop a string line down there if you need it to or run a string to it once you've got this done now you've got one support of those front legs that you're ready to make the mortises in it to fit these tents now one thing that I do with these is I come in here and I just cut it off just a little bit just like that just like that and just like this not all the way back to the shoulder just to the front and I'm gonna cut that notch small that this meets into that tenon and then I'm going to lash it as well back in here I'll show you that in a minute we're going to put a lashing on here hold it together this is Greenwood so I'm gonna shrink it should shrink somewhat together as long as the same species of wood but if we really want this good and solid without being able to bore through holes put pins in it or put nails into some sort we're gonna have to lash it will possibly glue it the glue in Greenwoods not a good idea either so we're going to use what I call a dovetail lash on this in just a few minutes okay now this is going to be our leg and this is our cross support here so we're going to want to line this up so they've got my spacing that I want and I'm gonna lay this dovetail right in the middle of that and then I'm going to mark with my knife the marking knife it doesn't really matter you can use your knife blade for this just as easy and all I'm doing is marking where that dovetail is coming in to that out and you can see if that's an angled line and that's important because this is a four spit joint now what we're going to do is we're going to cut this and remember this is an angle so when we cut this we want to cut it at an angle but that's our outside line we don't want to cut outside that so what we're going to do is we're going to mark this with a marker so you guys can see it really good so you understand exactly what I'm doing here this is the outside of my joint this is the centerline of my joint so I'm going to cut from here at an angle to here with my saw and then I'm going to pop that notch out and I want that notch to be about as deep as this is we're about a little over a third of the way through the material all right so let's Lock this dude up I saw it in I'll show you what I'm talking about here okay so we're drawing this on we're not gonna go any deeper than this see I'm touching that right now on this side on this side and the same thing over here about halfway down and what I've got to take out is enough space here and here to get that dovetail in there so I need an angle here and that's what I'm cutting in there so if I cut that angle here like this there's one side of it this angle becomes the other side here like this and then I'm going to cut right down the middle and then I'm just going to start taking a little kind of songs in between things there and that's just going to help everything come out that saw kerf ripping through there he's going to knock a lot of that stuff out of there now this notch here needs to be a little wider I can cut that with my knife or I can just cut that in with a saw real easy just like this make that just a little wider because I need a little bit of room for that joint you go in there and they're just keeping out to take a chunks out with your saw just like this it's where this dry wood blade comes in real handy because you can manipulate this thing really really well and then look at what you're getting for a hole in there and just widen things up where you need to you can always go back in there clean it up with your knife now just like any other mortise and tenon you're gonna have to come in and clean it up you'd have to do this with a chisel and pair this up a little bit you can do the same thing with your knife I would much rather have to remove material from this notch after the fact and have to even share cut a little bit out of here to make it bigger to accept my tenant then to have cut too much out of here from the beginning with my saw because I definitely can't put material back

okay we're getting pretty close now okay moment of truth here I'll lay this thing right here where you guys can see it get things lined up when we need them here and I'm just chopping it to the top gently

once you've pounded that in go ahead and come in here with your knife trim everything up so it's all neat it pretty much lines up with the edge just like this kind of double it over so it matches the wood that it's in you can shear cut back here if you need to straighten that out just come down on it take your knife in there and trim that out just like that now at this point you've got a pretty solid joint no question about that the woods gonna shrink it's green you can't guarantee that it's gonna shrink the same amount in both directions because shrinkage is different a lot different actually percentage-wise in diameter opposed to length so it's going to shrink more in the diet in the in the diameter here then it's going to shrink lengthwise here so this is probably going to get loose over time the best way to avoid that is to lash it with what I call a dovetail lash I'm going to show you that right now okay so the first thing we're going to do with this and we're going to come in here with our knife or our saw doesn't really matter and what's going to make a small sheer cut right behind this notch line right here like this doesn't have to be very deep and then we're going to put a shelf in there almost like we've cut a small steak notch in that piece of wood just like this doesn't have to be very deep at all and only needs to be deep enough to accept the string or the lashing that you're using in this case we're going to use 36 Bank line I just have a small notch right there okay to lash this dovetail I've got about a pull and a half of number 36 Bank language in my case means I've got about 8 feet of it I'm gonna double it over and put that doubled over portion that bite right in that notch I'm not going to start with a timber hitch I'm gonna come around the bottom side and put an X right across the front of that dovetail tenon and come all the way around on both sides on the outside just like this once I get to that point I'm gonna grab a propping stick wrap it on there and yank down tight as tight as I can get it get to that point I'm going to come around again across here and out and across here again and now when I get both of those out again and everything is neatened up tidied up and centered up everything's pushed together neat I'm gonna wrap that prop neck stick again and yank that thing down for all it's worth again well now I'm pulling this tenon in I'm locking the tenon in here and because I'm hooked on to this I'm forcing everything forward at the same time and now I'm gonna pull down on this thing really hard now when I come around from those two wraps over the top I'm gonna cross over this tenon right here and come down just like this I'm gonna give this thing one more good yank with the frapping stick to lock everything in and then I'm going to close it off just like you would any other lashing times us difficult to manipulate that one hand

and eating that up over on the side pull it down tight move on this side do the same thing hold everything tight and make sure you got a good x over there get between the X again one-handed operations pull it down tight make sure you push it everything neat and tidy up against each other so everything is nice and tight if you can get your frapping stick around that thing where you've got that clove hitch in there yank on that that's even better you should have enough tail left over to do that now what I generally do when I do a clove hitch is I put a stop knot in it right at the bottom snug that thing up as best as I can get it and I'll put a stop not on that side and a stop not on this side then that thing is not gonna come undone then you can just trim off your excess when you're done with that you got a really really tight joint right there that's not gonna come undone on you even if that wood shrinks a little bit that's not coming undone you'll have another crossbar down here on the bottom as well when you're done so you'll have two crossbars across the front two on the sides and then two on the back and then three going up the back of the chair guys I appreciate you join me out here today for a little refresher on how to make this woodland dovetail and the way that I lash it I created this dovetail latch to go with this type joint so that when the material shrinks down over time you're not going to lose the tightness of that joint this is a really really good way to make furniture if you don't have a lot of tools ax ninth saw which travel tool heavy carry lots of cordage and you can do a lot of work with very few tools a big camera at the path iron school I appreciate you joining me today I thank you for everything you do for school for our family for our business problem our sponsors instructors affiliates and friends I'm gonna get back on this chair I'll see how the next one