Is this construction faithful to originals ?

K

klkirkman

Well-known member
A book I have shows a technique for cutting the slanted sided of blind dovetails in drawer fronts in a series of slanted saw cuts that extend well beyond the extent of the depth of the dovetail and seem to be just left in place.

I was rather taken aback to see this, but perhaps I should have noticed this long ago. It just seems had to believe that a nice piece of furniture would have saw slits left showing on the back of the drawer front, and my structural design background makes me thinkthe open slots compromise the strength of the joint.

Karl
 
Is this construction faithful to originals ?

My view is yes, it is faithful to how furniture was built. Most of the period furniture i see tends to be quite rough on the interior parts.
 
Karl- This is the norm for a great deal of early stuff and is not an indicator of bad workmanship as some might suspect. Rather it's a faster way to get rid of the wood inside the pins: sawn instead of chiseled. You see this on Newport stuff, which is extremely finely finished in it's secondary surfaces.-Al
 
I'm not sure I understand what we are talking about. Is it a single saw cut on each side of the pin or multiple saw cuts across the waste area.
 
My original question was for the single saw cuts that were used used to define the boundar  and that subsequently remain behind on the rear of the finished drawer front as open saw cuts.

From the responses, it looks like it was quite common. I am chagrined to have never noticed them before.

Karl
 
Karl,
Your statement,"I am chagrined to have never noticed them before." goes to show how well it works.
I will be teaching a class on dovetails with a sample drawer in a case made with over cut dovetails. During the demonstration someone always questions why this is done and how terrible it must look in the case. I ask them if they have looked at the sample case, most of them have examined it fairly well, very few notice the over-cuts until they are pointed out. It is difficult to examine the back face of a drawer front without removing the drawer or at least making an effort to get your head in there.
 
Is going with AL on this one because if this was the practice in the better shops in Newport, i think we can assume it was done pretty much everywhere.  I would go one better and speculate  ( i just love to speculate about stuff i know little about) that the secondary joinery, at least in the larger shops, was not done by guy who did the joinery you could see.
 
I was taught to cut the dovetails oversawn like this and have seen it on original pieces.
As to the strength being possibly compromised, I once decided after completley finishing a piece to replace the drawer fronts, I thought perhaps I could reuse the sides. They had been glued up for perhaps 6 months, with some titebond glue. Even steaming the joint, I could not knock it apart with a rubber mallet.
I am certain there is very little loss of joint strength by the over cut. I had to make complete new drawers;well, I did reuse the bottoms.
 
Mike,

It must be the " Puritan  woodworker " instinct beaten into me as a child.  I still remember the sequence of fitted joints we made:  T-ee shaped  1x 3 straight lapped into 1 x 3,  T-ee shaped dovetail 1 x 3 lapped into a 1 x 3,  and finally a pinned mortise and tenon corner L-bracket with a diagonal brace that had that neat angled blind tenon inside each end of the diagonal brace and what appeared to be a simple scarphed joint showing; supposedly used in timber framing. The instructor went over them with a magnifying glass to check the tightness of the fits all around.

Makes me wary of leaving open saw cuts showing , but I certainly accept that it was done that way.

Karl
 
Karl,
Dont get me wrong, there were dovetails on secondary surfaces in period work that would give a CNC machine a run for it's money in precise cuts. It's just that, more often than not, joinery that was not seen tended to be on the rough side. I am guessing that their clients were just not concerned with un-seen surfaces, nevermind paying more money to get secondary surfaces "perfect".
 
Just to clarify, I just used Newport as an example because they were so meticulous. I've seen oversawing on stuff from all over New England and in every period.-Al
 
Another thing that needs to be considered here is the historical context when this furniture was built. As homes were lit primarily by candle light, they were quite dark, even during the day. So its no surprise that interior/secondary joinery that could not be seen was left in a structurally sound but not "pretty" condition. This makes sense to me.

HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY
 
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