Shopsmith Forums

My wife wants to do some above ground gardening. We were looking at kits in the store and we saw one that uses sliding dovetails. It looks slick and the dovetails make it easy to assemble and disassemble without tools. Since these boards are rather long I was toying with different ways to route the dovetails on the end of the board. The Shopsmith seems like a natural to dovetail the end of the long boards on a sled and cut the dovetails while the board is horizontal. The corner pieces could always be cut in "drill press" mode above the table or I could just use the router table. I could also route them freehand with the router and a jig but where's the fun in that.

Any thoughts on best way to do this? Anyone ever try horizontal routing?

Michael

I haven't tried it but I see no reason it couldn't be done. Shopsmith used to market a separate tool called a Jointmatic which was essentially a horizontal router.

A caveat: Be careful to not allow the work piece to rise above the table and cause the bit to go into climb mode. Clamped to a sled is a good procedure.

Curious what bit you will be using.



Actually I think a hand held router and jig would be preferable(assuming 2x lumber) to the drill press method. Routers are more easily moved than long heavy lumber.

You would need to either built a jig to fit on top of the table for the bit to be recessed into or keep the table in front of the bit but close enough to maintain downward pressure on the piece. All the horizontal routers have the bit buried in the table so the work piece can be passed over the bit you do not want to trap the workpiece between the table and bit.

Band saw, jig saw, scroll saw ? freehand with a router and a jig or hand saw sounds like a good option , will the joints be loose enough to keep the boards from swelling up ?

JMO

Hobbyman2 wrote:Band saw, jig saw, scroll saw ? freehand with a router and a jig or hand saw sounds like a good option , will the joints be loose enough to keep the boards from swelling up ?

JMO

A loose fit may prevent the swelling from causing binding.

Thanks for the responses.

To answer some questions:
The fit would be very loose. The purpose of the dovetail is just to keep the boards from falling over so not a precise fit at all.

I have no clue on what bit to use yet. In fact the band saw or possibly the compound miter/chop saw might work just as well to make the dovetail in the long boards.

I did see a video once where they made a special wide dovetail using the dado to make a wide channel then skimmed the edges of the channel with the dovetail bit to finish the cut. It worked well in the video.

In thinking about it after reading the feedback it would probably be easier to make a jig for the hand held router to skim each side of the board then do the corner piece on the Shopsmith. The corner piece has a dovetail on all 4 sides so lots of wood removal. I'm going to try the dado dovetail combo to see how that works out if we decide on using 2x8. If we go with 1x8 then I will do the corner piece on the router table and just cut one channel then move the fence over a little to make it a loose fit to account for wood swelling.

Thanks guys

Michael