http://woodwins.blogspot.com/2012/08/wedged-dovetail-pictures.html

Kelley

Cheers,
Brian

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2169961/IMG_0389.JPG ; and
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2169961/IMG_0391.JPG

Any comments would be very welcome!

Cheers,
Brian

I imagine it depends on where you live, but most any antique shop in the Shenandoah Valley where I am will one or more of these chests on display.

I do not know how to make computer drawings and link to them, although that is a good idea a previous commenter requested. Perhaps someone who is SketchUp savvy (PW staff?) could help.

As far a published information, I am not aware of any of any substance. That might be because everything that I have checked is of an English background, and this comes from an German tradition. Maybe someone who reads German might have seen something.

The web has little more to offer. All the threads seem to start with someone like Chris S. saying wow look at this, what’s up, and the answer that shuts it down is that someone was trying to tighten up some loose joints. Hundreds and hundreds of beautifully made chests with each and every pin wedged suggests otherwise.

I have yet to talk to a museum curator who has given much thought to this. When I showed one what I was talking about, she suggested writing an article for FWW. Well okay, this is an interesting woodworking joint for sure, but it has so much more to offer to the study of period furniture. I know that most curators are not from a building background, but a sustained shop practice is just as much a signature as a bellflower design. There is also interesting stuff here about gluing and clamping procedures, always difficult information to come up with about early shops.

Your point about a chisel stab to get the wedges inserted is a good one, and the lines on the side of the drawer are very interesting. I had not seen that before. If indeed they are traces from a chisel splitting the pin, then it suggests not a very deep split.

I have two reasons for why I think a saw cut might have been made . First, the chests that I have seen have wedges that are neatly and systematically placed in the pins. There is some slight variation within the same chest, but it is so consistent that I thought only a saw cut could account for that. Splitting that many pins with a chisel you might expect would produce some unevenness due to grain runout.
The second reason is that very often the wedge is so thick for the width of the pin, it seems to me there has to be some space for all that wedge to go. Say an 18 inch deep chest has 10 pins or more and each wedge is near an 1/8th, the you are looking at over an inch or more of wedge! The flared dovetail cuts account for some of this, but the amount of slope that I see is not very much.
If a sawcut was used, then of course it would have been made before assembly, there being no way to saw across the entire width of the pin after knocking it together. The cut does not need to go all the way down, which might explain why there no sign of a sawcut at the bottom of apin. However you would expect to find one every now and then, and I have never found one. This would support the chisel opening theory

At any rate,I have used saw cuts when making these joints. I wll try the chisel cut approach sometime and see what happens. I am probably just too nervous about splitting the tail board.
Perhaps both approaches were used. It wouldn’t surprise me. Maybe someone will come up with a way of telling for sure.

Toby