Clear out the waste with the ¼” endmill and your first TAP file, finish off with the dovetail bit and your second TAP file. Now we are establishing the permanent sides of these board, mark the sides to the vertical angle as the bottom. Raise the boards high enough so that you will clear the angle when cutting (more than 0.5” in this example). Snug the boards to your vertical surface. Make sure you align the faces of the two boards that must be exactly equal in length. I try to avoid tear out at all costs, especially on the show faces, this is a great way to do it. In this case I arranged the boards show face to show face. I had some cherry that had a great patina on it, and I wanted to preserve that look. For my most recent project, we wanted to go with the new antique look. My design zeros in the lower left corner. Make sure to add 0.005 offset to both tool paths so the dovetails fit together nicely, that would be a -0.005 entry to make sure you cut just outside the lines. This necessitates you making another tool path where you flip the design from the first side over by mirroring it around the center of the ½” board. When you cut, you will flip the board top to bottom, keeping the left and right sides where they are. Nothing fancy here, you can use a ¼” endmill and you need to extend more than 0.25” past each face of the board to keep sharp edges. Using that geometry and the 8-degree angle, you can layout pockets to remove the waste for the pins. You know from your tails how thick your pins will be from the narrow end. So the height of my design board becomes one inch. The best approach, if you can do it in your machine, is to cut both tail boards (I prefer they be the front and back board for a box) at the same time. The other part of the design is board height. Use a small stepover (0.06”) and an offset cutting strategy.
#Maverick cnc dovetail joints full
Then I will use the dovetail bit, defined as an endmill with a 0.359” diameter, to make a full depth cut that will create the angled sides of the tails. For cutting sequence first I will use the rectangles and a ¼” bit to clear out the waste material to full depth. This is so the dovetail bit can plunge to full depth when doing a pocket cut without cutting the sides of your workpiece where you don’t want it to.
#Maverick cnc dovetail joints plus
The length needs to be the thickness of the wood (0.5”) plus a little more. I round up to 0.5” for my spacing.įirst I layout three rectangles about 0.5” wide. So those parameters are all you need to complete the design.įirst thing to find out is what is the diameter of the dovetail bit at 0.5”(depth of cut) from the bottom? You can use trig, or you can just draw it in vectors to find out it is 0.359” and that is as close as you can get for your dovetail to dovetail spacing. It just looks less clunky than ¾” for this size. at the bottom) and an 8-degree side angle (from the center of the tool to the side is 8 degrees) you can pick one up in HD or Lowes.įor a medium sized box, say 6” to 15” across the front, I like to use ½” thick material. In this case I’m using a dovetail bit with a 0.5” major diameter (biggest dia. In designing dovetail cuts in the software, the design must make its concessions to the tool used. many small dovetails spread far apart) and are more than strong enough. For box sides this gives you plenty of surface area for glue up, the dovetails look like a more prominent feature (vs. 2” to 4” gets 2 dovetails, and 4-5 gets 3 dovetails. Board width of 2” or less gets one dovetail. As a rule of thumb, I like to follow the old woodworker’s standards for building a box with dovetails. I have not used the dovetail gadgets that you can find on the Vectric website or user produced gadgets, but some of the advice below will also be very useful with them. This is how you can usually tell if a dovetail was machine cut or hand cut. With hand cutting you can make small pins, much smaller than with CNC because the cutter size limits you. CNC cutting is the aesthetics of the design. The biggest difference in hand cutting vs. I see a lot of the paradise design, which is a good box, but I see very little to none with dovetails on the CNC, so I thought it might be good to pass on some of my knowledge to you so when you’re tired of cutting signs and plaques (which make great box tops), you’ll be able to knock out a dovetail box quickly. My go to have most recently been the dovetail joint, and I love cutting those by hand, but have done many with my CNC. Some with box joints, most with dovetails, and some with special CNC designed joints. I’ve made a lot of boxes for people and myself.
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