Angled dovetails
Some more – increasingly rare – time in the shed over the last week or so, and I started cutting the top shelf for the desk.
While I had the desk assembled to this stage the last day, I scribed the top shelf angles with pencil and set the board aside. Then this week, after thinking about it a bit, I double-checked the angles of the sides of the walnut board – because it’s the core around which all this is built – and then I used the angles of the walnut board, and the width from the scribe marks (and yes, I double-checked that the sides were plumb to the desk before scribing), and used those two to cut the top shelf.
I didn’t cut them according to the scribe marks’ angles because there’s a little bit of twist in the sides (not much, maybe 4-5mm over the full length of the sides, and the sides are poplar, not oak) so the top shelf should be pulling them back to the walnut board’s angles, not locking in their twist.… Read the rest