Thread: Sawdust putty

No.
It might if you used pine coloured timber putty (not sawdust mixed with glue).
Would be better to have a bit more of a practice first on those dovetails with an inexpensive Japanese type dovetail saw and forget about gaps.
Aim for the moon! and you will probably get over the fence.

I was thinking that too, that if I'm planning to stuff up that's not a great start!

Whilst dovetails might seem a bit intimidating at first, they are really just about accurate marking and then accurate cutting. You can do them with a blunt old tennon saw and dodgy chisel however with a cheap Jap saw and a sharp chisel the problems soon go away.
Good luck.

Before you use any PVA + wood putty on a real joint I suggest you make some and try it out on straight cuts in wood..
The combination of PVA with sawdust of the same wood as you are trying to plug the hole therein rarely if ever produces anything like the same look as the wood itself and more often than not can make things worse by highlighting mistakes because the end result is either texturally and/or colourised quite differently to the original wood.

Like others have suggested it's far better to put effort in to practicing cutting the joint rather than looking for ways of correcting mistakes.

Ta, yes i have to agree with that. Funnily enough, only after i published this post, that exact same logic entered my skull...

The old-timers would gently rap the pin of a gappy dovetail which often will spread the fibres and fill the gap - it is not modern best practice and you should aim for a tight fit but this does work to cover up small defects


Screwing up in new ways every day

With regard to the sawdust/pva putty, I tried this a while ago - mixed it and applied it with a steel plasterers small tool. The mix oxidized, turned blue and made the fill look very obvious.

Try cellulose sanding sealer instead of PVA. Does not cloud the colour.
Phil

Yikes (to Fuzzie's comment)

Originally Posted by Djuka

Hi all,
I'm a relatively new hobbyist, practising dovetails for a project i have to crack on with in the next couple of weeks.
My practice dovetails have yielded increasing accuracy, but sometimes i have gaps.
In the eventuality that i end up with some gaps in the joints in the final piece I'm planning ahead to have a filler to fall back on, just in case.
Have read about making putty from sawdust generated by the work in progress. I guess the colour match wouldn't be a problem if i made up a sawdust-pva putty.
Question is, would stain take to the putty like to the timber? (in this case it would be pine).
Anyone have any ideas or experience in this regard?
Thanks
Andrei

Hi Andreil
planning to use a filler is planning to fail -- I can't believe that this is your real intent.

keep practicing -- pine is notorious for difficulty when cutting crisp joints. So if you can get close in pine, you should have no difficulty with better timber.

If you do end up with gaps in your final piece, you can "fix" them by tapping in a sliver of the same wood. With a little care, the sliver will be invisible even under a stain.

Originally Posted by Djuka

Question is, would stain take to the putty like to the timber? (in this case it would be pine).
Anyone have any ideas or experience in this regard?
Thanks
Andrei

I'm going to try and make the forum a good place to ask a question. Talk about some annoying answers !! Guys!

Stain is not going to take exactly the same Andrei, but with a pit of experimenting it can come out almost invisible, Whopping big gaps are harder to disguise. Filler from saw dust is one of the fillers that tradesmen used before modern fillers came along. Antique restoration is one place you still see highly paid experts still using it. PVA or in the old days Hide glue.When your working on something that is old there is lots of other marks that make a bit of patching not stand out so much , so yeah , with new stuff, crisp joinery is better and you'll get there with a little practice. Tapered slivers of the same wood is good but if its fine gaps sawdust is the go .

Some techniques with sawdust filler are

If your staining dark and colour doesn't matter. Fine dust floats , if you do enough woodwork, the higher in the workshop you search the finer the dust gets . I have been seen up a ladder collecting fine filler dust from ledges above door ways .

One way of getting fine colour matched dust, is to shave the end grain of the timber species you need , this is put in a motar and pestal and ground up , the end grain crumbles into fine powder more easy.

Some people just sand with sand paper to get it or scrape the end grain with the cabinet scraper .

One method, a nice old Italian tradesman told me was , for filling marks / holes under where a veneer would be covering later, charcoal was mixed in , this reduced shrinkage later which would have shown up under a high shine .

A filler mix wet enough , so that a last dusting of dry dust just sticks, is something I like to do . It hides better.

Its not just a gappy dovetail remedy of course . cracks in the back boards of cabinets, or drawer bottoms. cracked knots. Its a good way to fill the under side out of the way problems quickly and cheaply . usually not so good for the type of filling that is going to be polished as part of the show surface . There is a whole other way of doing that.

Bogging up , as its known, takes some skill to do right . you can learn more about it watching a good plasterer and apply some of that to filling with woodwork BTW .

Rob

Thanks for the very detailed answer! That was the info i was looking for.
Thanks for taking the time, Rob.
Andrei

Any sort of filler tends to highlight the fault rather than hide it. A better method is to cut a thin sliver of the same wood and glue and tap it into the gap with the same grain orientation as the tail/pin and then cut/sand flush. If well done it is virtually an invisible repair.
BF

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tc-w7Bln1pM
This is a video of the technique I mentioned. I am not sure is my cutting and pasting worked. But if you go to the youtube channel and search for 'Dovetail repair' you should find it there as well
BF