Dovetails in MakerCrate Video

[scottp55]

It's even better in person, so solid it's not funny. Just put wheelchair parts in van at -10F up here. They lost money on the deal-and NO-Never dealt with another company like them! they bent over backwards for us. Absolutely made the right choice for the two machines! It's more than just the price and features you have to compare. Kudos TJ and Bill!

[lepton]

I made up a sample file over the weekend and ran it through EdgeTailer.
Converted .sbp output to gcode to run through the simulator.



I'll be on the ShopBot tomorrow to turn these bits into atoms!

One clarification - the angle parameter in EdgeTailer is not the included angle of the wood but degrees off vertical. That is the 'air' portion of the angle.



In my case the tails have an included angle of 55.52 degrees


I needed to put 34.48 in the angles parameter to get the desired result.

Good Stuff and thanks again Bill!

[bill.young]

That's very cool...let me know how it turns out!

[robtown]

I was looking play with the underlying code... but it's just the exe.

Would you be interested in letting us fork with your code a bit?

[bill.young]

Hey Rob,

If I can get it cleaned up so that it's usable I'll put it up. It's old VB6 code that I just put together for my own use so has no comments...basically just good enough to do what I needed. Definitely not clean enough for public consumption in its current state

It may be easier for me to just extract the math behind it and post that...let me see what I can do.

[lepton]

Bob-
The angles surfaces were a bit 'fuzzy' but with a little sanding things worked really well for my first attempt.
I had the material thickness wrong by 0.014 and it is noticeable.

Bit used was a Whiteside UD2102
10,000 RPM
1.5"/sec cut
0.5"/sec plunge
Cut single pass with depth of 0.39"

Closeups of the joint for those interested:

[Billions]

It takes a second to really understand how special this is. Great job.

Hopefully that VCarvePro gadget you're talking about comes around soon. That would be amazing to easily add dovetails like this to projects.

Again, great job!

[EricSchimel]

So the gadget is here:

http://gadgets.vectric.com/dovetail.html

I'm about to make a couple of these maker crates out of some rough plywood (I'm using them to ship stuff)

Does anyone have a sense to the tolerance? Since I'll be using the Vectric Gadget do I have to account for clearance?

To use the terminology in the gadget should my "pins" (or the parts that don't have the special angle in them) be slightly narrower than the female part of the dovetails (the part with the angle in them) so that I can get an easy fit?

These creates are going to be screwed together too, so I really want the dovetails for the stability in one direction, the screws will keep them engaged.

[adrianm]

I made a few of the dovetails when testing the gadget. It's best to make some test samples first as, with most jobs, the tolerance of fit depends on many factors such as the material, sharpness of the bit, feed rates, even humidity with some materials. The gadget itself has a cut allowance that can be set so there's no need to adjust the vectors.

[EricSchimel]

I just knocked out two crates. I used some cheap 23/32 sheathing plywood from HD and it worked great. I did .04 for my clearance. I could have gone a bit tighter, but it worked great. I shot a few screws to hold everything together and I've now got a rugged shipping crate!

If I was making a nice plywood box for someone I'd definitely experiment with a tighter tolerance.

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