(no subject)

[gchpaco]

Three-minute dovetails with Frank Klausz. Seriously, it takes this guy less time to cut those out than it does for me to find my marking gauge to start. Most instructions for dovetailing involve farting around with a sliding bevel to make sure that all the angles are the same, but he just eyeballs it (and I should, too; the angle isn’t that critical). I want one of those bow saw blades with the 90° bend in it, but I’m under no illusions that one of them would let me do what he does here. Jesus.

If you haven’t seen him before, Klausz is a Hungarian (I think?) carpenter who immigrated and now does custom furniture here. He is one of the best known craftsmen in the field at the moment, and takes the job of teaching seriously.

Comments

[natetg.livejournal.com]

It's probably possible to make a sawblade like that by welding it out of normal ones. I'd guess that that would be one of the easier part of the process of getting to 3 minute dove tails.

[gchpaco.livejournal.com]

You can get most of the way there with a coping saw. Hell, I've heard of certain (crazy) people using bandsaws to clean up their dovetail waste, which strikes me as much more difficult than just chopping it out with a chisel. The rest of it only requires a lifetime of work.

[necama.livejournal.com]

You could make a sawblade like that one simply by heating a blade with a torch and puting a twist on the blade using a couple of pairs of vice grips. You'd have to properly anneal it later, but it wouldn't be too hard....

[gchpaco.livejournal.com]

All I know about heat treating saw blades is 'spring steel'. I have the temperatures around here somewhere, but as I recall it's a fairly narrow band for good performance and you need to hit it fairly consistently along the length of the blade. Which, to me, says something like "unsuitable for ghetto heat treating via MAPP torch". But hey, I'd like to give it a shot some time.

[necama.livejournal.com]

Look at it this way: band saw blades are welded using very localized heat, and then annealed at a slightly lower temperature until the blade "blues up." The color the steel takes on tells you how good your weld is.

So basically, you need a good way to control the temperature for the annealing, but for the twisting process, you just need lots of heat. And you can experiment! Blades are cheap.