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Before: This is how I was cutting sliding dovetails and rabbets by hand.
I’ve been cutting a lot of large-scale sliding dovetails and rabbets lately. And when these housed joints get to a certain size (think of a dovetail socket that is 4” wide and 30” long) it’s much more efficient to saw out the walls by hand.
When I need the rabbets or sliding dovetails to be bang-on, I clamp a batten to my work to guide the saw. I use a vertical batten for rabbets and an angled one for sliding dovetails.
After. The small pusher block makes all the difference.
The only tricky part about the joint is keeping the sawplate against the batten. Usually I use my fingers, but it’s easy to get the tips of your fingers shredded if you aren’t careful.
Then I saw a little trick in an old English woodworking magazine that turned on a lightbulb: Use a block of wood to press the sawplate to the batten. I started doing this in June, and it immediately made the joint easier to cut and more accurate.
Give it a try.
— Christopher Schwarz
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