How to Size Dovetails | Paul Sellers 

He draws a straighter line free hand than I do with a straightedge

Yes no thinking and no buying unnecessary tools!

Also look up the dividers method of dovetails. It can be a bit of guess and check to get the exact size you want, but it makes it very easy to do a large number of dovetails very quickly in one batch and have them all come out exactly the same.

True. Every time he draws a line from a tickmark without a straightedge, I'm agog. Then he measures and it's spot on.

Probably a bad habit now. hard to change.

Peter Compton I'm sure there those who appreciate it as not everyone is metric. UK for example would be happy with 9mm whereas America would recognise and associate better with 3/8, so he caters for all as opposed to leaving one guessing.

Haha, I think it's a British habit, I apprenticed as a carpenter in the U.K. and can use both metric and imperial measurements with fluency, now I live in "metric" Canada, I only use imperial measurements!

That captured my eye, also. Constantly! There also was a prototype or miniature version on his tool shelf. I've envisioned how he built it. Soon, we will see, I hope.

I think it's an upcoming class for his website

Yes, its an upcoming wwmc series. I included the neatest internal joints inside this one.

What is wwmc? Thanks.

InTnMnNmAz. Wood working master classes

Rob Neale I

Hi. It is more complicated but you just have to do the geometry. Whatever slopes you have on the sides you would use a sliding bevel to establish the angles on both the pins and the tails.

With a 3/16" (4.7mm) or 1/8" (3mm) chisel. On superfines you might use a 1/16" (1.6mm) chisel.

I think it's 2, 4 ,5 ,7 Or maybe 2, 4, 6 ,8 He may have just used them for visual demonstration with what he had lying around not wanting to bother ripping them to size for no real reason😂

I explain it in the blog i wrote.

It looks like this. Say you want 10 mm pins, so you devide 10 by 2 and get 5. Now you draw two lines along the piece offsetting 5 mm. These are the lines you align the ruler to. When you have the centre points of the pins you add 5 mm on either side which gives you 10 mm, and 5 mm to the lines you already have along the piece; 5 and 5 is 10 again. So all the pins are now 10 mm.

Stupid me -- I did watch again and caught the 5 mil compensation as adding back the half pins to get full pins at the edges. Thanks for your kindness to my poor concentration.

Thank you Misha _

+Mark Schofield Paul used imperial when he was first learning woodworking then swapped to metric when everyone else in the UK did. Then he moved to the US and swapped back again. He is back in the UK now and is very proficient with both but is most comfortable with feet and inches. - Team Paul

Growing up in the UK everything in school was in metric and everything out of school was still in inches so I naturally use both. I tend to rough out in feet and inches and do precision work in mm.

Just completely fuck shit up like we do in the UK and use both metric and imperial at once! Weigh sugar by the pound, meat by the kilo and ourselves in stone. Buy water and soft drinks by the litre but milk by the pint (beer is bought either by the litre or the pint depending whether you're buying it on draught or bottle). We measure cables in metres and ourselves in feet and inches. We measure our fuel in litres but fuel economy in miles per gallon. Snow/rainfall is measured in millimetres but windspeed is miles per hour.

Imperial is my first language. I can work equally well in both but visualise better in imperial and can gauge distances in any increment up to 2" to within 1/32" (1mm) by eye and then after that to within say 1/8". This I cannot do in metric so it is something we learn at a very early age. I have noticed that many young people cannot gauge size accurately in either standard and I am not sure if there is a good reason or that we no longer require it at a young age. As an apprentice I was expected to be ably to guestimate a size by eye. Getting it wring was a rap on the knuckles or the back of the head. Not harshly, but do that today and you'd likely be in prison.

Now that you're leaving the EU the French can't make you use their metric system anymore! You'll be free to return to the good old British imperial measurement system for everything. Make Britain great again!