JimD Dovetailing Station

[JimD]

My pictures are not as good as LarryG's but hopefully they will be good enough to give you and idea what I did. I made mine before Larry's post but was inspired to share it by the interest in his design. You can see I added a drawer underneith for storage and to raise the jig for ease of use. The drawer is 6 inches tall (and dovetailed together, of course). A key feature is the side stops. I find this helps my accuracy to have the larger stops. I also write the position of the stops on the jig so I can return to that position. I switch between a 1/2 and a 7/16 template fairly often. I added pictures of the jig I use for positioning the stop bar and for setting the depth of the router bit (sorry that one is pretty fuzzy). I also added a picture of the board I made for initial setup before I had lines on the jig. It has a line 1/2 the dovetail template's spacing then lines at the template's spacing. For a 7/16, the first line is 7/32 from the edge then additional lines are 7/16 apart. You put this board in the position of the drawer front, clamp it so that the lines are just inside of the template fingers and set the stop.

I also added a picture of my magnetic micropositioner. It is a normal Sears branded micropositioner with a rare earth magnet cup and magnet on the micropositioner and washers glued to the rip fence. The main advantages are reduced lash and you don't have to lift the rip fence to add the micropositioner.

[LCHIEN]

sorry Jim, it looks like you reduced both the size resolution AND the color palette resolution (maybe 16 colors) - they look like cartoons.

[JimD]

Loring,

You are absolutely right. I noticed it right after I posted the note but my laptop started acting up so I could not get back in to fix it. I think these will be legible. I am obviously still learning how to manipulate pictures where they are small enough to be posted but still legible enough to be useful.

Jim

[JimD]

Sorry about the middle picture - it is still too small a file. The last one is the focus of the camera. There is a fine thread drywall screw that is adjusted to be at the right height in the cutout on the scrap to show you where to set the router bit. If you know what you are looking at you can kind of see what is going on.

Jim

[LarryG]

That's pretty neat, Jim. If I'd seen your pictures before I built mine, I likely would've ripped off a couple of your ideas.

Do you keep your dovetailing router in the drawer? One minor problem that has surfaced with my design is that I have to be a little careful as I'm toting it around the shop, because the router sometimes tries to topple off as I lift and tilt the station to clear the various obstacles. Held flat, there's no problem, but there's one narrow passage where I have to tilt the base fairly sharply.

[JimD]

Larry,

I have two large drawers on my BT3100 stand that hold my PC690 routers and extra bases. I thus do not store them on the dovetailing station. I do not keep either router set up to do dovetails permanently. I will keep the dovetail setup on the fixed base which has the variable speed motor (mostly by chance) until I need that base for something else. It only takes me a couple minutes to reinstall the template guide and bit - the depth adjustment jig helps speed things up noticably (i.e. getting the height of the bit is the tricky part).

Between the HF dovetail jig and the extra plywood of my stand, it isn't real light. I could easily lift it with the router on there but I would just as soon not. I keep it about 2 steps from my outfeed table/workbench. The BT3100 is about 4 steps away. One advantage of a fairly small space is not many steps required.

Jim