Adrian's Dovetail Practice
My first dovetail attempt was done with poplar scraps I had lying
around.
I thought this was pretty good for a first effort and so I moved on to
half-blind dovetails.
The half blind dovetails were vastly more difficult than through
dovetails, so I stuck with through dovetails and moved on to a piece
of lacewood from which I built two boxes. Lacewood was fairly soft
and easy to cut but it tended to split.
In order to practice dovetails, I had ordered several species of thin
wood from Advantage Lumber
and planned to use them in order of difficulty. Next on the list was
Canary Wood which was listed as easy to work and weighing in at 31
pounds per cubic foot. (Oak, in comparison, is 45 pounds per cubic foot.)
After working this wood for a while I got suspicious and weighed it on
my kitchen scale. It was 17 pounds per cubic foot denser than
advertised at 48 pounds per cubic foot. And it was much harder to cut
than the lacewood but was well behaved and I was able to get a really
nice finish. (It turns out that Advantage lumber has the description
for tulip wood on their canarywood page.)
I ended up with a knot in one of the tails shown in the left hand
picture.
