Saturday Tweets: Muting, RIP Hygge and an Owl

Cutting Dovetail Joints With a Router Jig

My woodworking skills are, to be charitable, dodgy. But working with wood is an unavoidable necessity in our old house. So towards the end of 2017 I began taking woodworking classes in an effort to raise the level of my craftsmanship and the first practical project I tackled was redoing some drawers in the kitchen. In order to do that I needed to cut some dovetails.

Dovetail joints are used most often for making drawers. The arrangement of the joint makes for a drawer that resists racking. Dovetail joints also prevent the front from coming off with repeated use. Even without glue the joint wants to stay together. It’s also, I think, very attractive.

The two most common dovetail joints are through dovetails:

Image: Wikipedia.

And half-blind dovetails:

Image: Wikipedia.

Since I’m working on faced drawers I used through dovetails. I hope to make some furniture soon that will make use of half blind dovetails.

To cut my dovetails I used a router and jig both made by Porter Cable. There are some other jigs on the market that work just as well but, judging from the reviews, I’d avoid the cheap models. Setting up a dovetail jig is a time intensive process and somewhat confusing in terms of orientation and adjustment. It took me the better part of a day and some repeated YouTube viewing before I made a functional joint. An inexpensive pair of digital calipers made fine tuning the jig a lot easier.

Once the jig is set you can crank out a lot of joints relatively quickly. You attach a guide to the bottom of your router and simply move in and out of the metal guides that are clamped on top of the wood. You cut the tails first and then flip the metal guides to cut the pins. My Porter Cable jig I have does through dovetails, half blind dovetails, rabbeted half-blind, sliding dovetails, box joints and miniature versions of all these joints.

Someday I will cut a dovetail joint by hand, but I’ve got a lot of drawers to fix and I appreciate the efficiency of using power tools for this task. While dovetails cut with a router have a machine-like uniformity, I think they still look a lot better than joints done with screws.

I give myself a mixed review for my first attempt. The drawers work fine but there’s room for improvement. I’m still learning and I gained a huge appreciation for drawer details such as dimensions, wood grain orientation, material choice and hardware options. I can also see using this attractive joint for other projects around the house such as boxes and cat furniture (!).

Now I wish I could unsee my dovetail apprenticeship. The modern world is full of shoddy drawers and once you see the world through the rubric of the square and solid dovetail joint, the sight of a screwed together drawer could tip you into a fit of zealotry. You might just burn down your local Ikea.

I’ll do a longer blog post about retrofitting old built-in drawers when I get around to redoing the bathroom cabinets. In the meantime let’s please #MakeAmericaDovetailAgain.

Practical, Positive and Peaceable

[Editors note 2022: I’ve come to see Eisenstein’s thinking as deeply flawed listen to this podcast for what I agree are many of the problems with his work. I also have come to see the problems with my own posts here. Sometimes you have to fight. Sometimes you have to be cranky. To not fight or be cranky in the face of death and injustice is an unethical political stance.]

I have a rule about Root Simple content that I call the three “Ps:” keep all posts practical, positive and peaceable (by peaceable I mean non-divisive). This is not to say that I think that we should all put our heads in the sand and ignore the important issue of our time. But if you want strife and conflict there’s plenty of options, especially on the web, and I don’t need to add my voice to the din.

So, ironically, I spent many hours over the past few days writing a cranky blog post that violated all of the “Ps.” In it I railed against Facebook, Elon “Rocket Man” Musk’s techno-utopianism and the horrible day LA politicians and film industry lobbyists stole the green bike lanes on Spring street. While these issues are significant, my post didn’t have anything new to say. I fell into the knee-jerk belligerence trap that Charles Eisenstein said we have to get past in a prescient lecture at St. James Church in London back in 2016. I listened to that lecture again last night and I suggest you listen too if you haven’t already (this is the second time I’ve posted it). In the lecture, Eisenstein articulates a new narrative outside of the old story of “separation.” Eisenstein says,

But on the other hand, we do know what to do. And often what we need to do are precisely those things that seem irrelevant. The heart says yes to them, but the mind says how could that possibly help? How could it possibly help to spend ten years trying to free one orca from captivity? How could it possibly help to spend ten years taking care of one old woman with Alzheimer’s? The things that draw us, our world story does not have a place for them, so they seem impractical, they seem unrealistic or naïve. But when we understand the deep root of the crisis, which is the totality of the story of separation that surrounds us, then we see that yeah, these are actually essential, because they change the foundation of the world-destroying machine . . .

On a personal level, it’s almost a cliché, but bringing more love into the world. And also on a community level, also through what you devote your life energy toward. If it doesn’t fit into the story of separation, if it’s dedicated to bringing beauty, love compassion…..this is not news to anybody, right? But I guess the reason I’m saying it is to illuminate the political dimension of it. And maybe that’s what the song is. To listen to what is beautiful, to what calls to your heart. Maybe that’s the organ that listens to the song, that guides you to do things that the mind, which is still lost in the maze, may not recognize as relevant, but which is actually our path to that more beautiful world that we remember and recognize and carry with us.

In between working on that unsuccessful and angry blog post I was finishing the dovetailed drawers I had constructed over the holidays. Rather than wasting time trying to fight Facebook I could have been writing up a post about those drawers. As Eisenstein suggests, perhaps its time to do the things that don’t make sense and that don’t seem important: pursue beauty, grow something, build something. Stay tuned for a post on those dovetails.

Saturday Tweets: Goodbye 2017

2017 the Year in Review

A Dahlia at the National Heirloom Exposition in September.

This was not an easy year. Just months after Kelly’s Thanksgiving of 2016 aortic dissection and open heart surgery, my mom fell ill. After a painful struggle my mom passed in April.

These reminders of our mortality inspired the most prevalent theme themes on the blog this year: impermanence, the nature of stuff and the need to declutter. I reread Marie Kondo and fell deep into the words of Arts and Crafts movement luminaries John Ruskin, William Morris and Gustav Stickley. These folks had a lot to say about consumer culture, beauty and utility and they have inspired a top to bottom remodeling of our old house and garden that will continue into the coming year.

As to the garden, it fell into such a state of disrepair that we’ve decided to hire someone to help us clean things up and come up with plan. We’ll blog about the process and, if all goes well, have some before and after photos to share.

On a lighter note, we added a dog, Ivan, to our menagerie of household critters. A friend of ours, April, noted that he looks a lot like 70s prog-rocker Todd Rundgren.

In the fall I took some woodworking classes and created a workshop in one half of our garage. My workshop has become a sort of analog safe space, a place to escape the technological claws of the Silicon Valley tech bros who rob our time and track our every movement.

Lastly, some well deserved thanks go out to the Electronic Frontier Foundation for successfully cancelling the urban homestead trademark this year and freeing that phrase for all to use. I’d also like to thank Eric Rochow of Garden Fork for his ongoing support for our blog and podcast. There were many times this year when I did not feel like writing or putting together the podcast. Eric served both as an emergency guest and as an encouraging voice. And, of course, thank you all for reading our blog and listening to our podcast and for your many kind comments and emails.