Thread: 472 sets of Dovetails

I guess they only got uniform when the dovetail machine was invented...

Sadly I don't have a pic of our very old German made Wilhelm Grupp Dovetail machine.

It had a bed about a meter long.

The cutter head had 5 cutters - each second one spun the opposite way to its neighbor...so the cutters were left and right handed ground - and in tool steel not tungsten.

The cutters rotated very slowly in comparison to todays routers & jigs.

The jig which the chisel dummy followed - was a square bar, that could be rotated to 3 different positions - and each side of the rotating guide bar had different sized dovetails - and you had to swap to larger or smaller cutters (3 sizes) to match the guide bar!

You could for example do a dovetail run of 1 meter (for say a blanket box) in one go - and it cut both pieces at the same time (as do the modern jigs these days).

It was over 100 years old I believe.

Hell of a machine - i know where it is to this day - but doubt the owner would let it go.

We couldn't buy cutters for it in the end - couldn't find a machinist who could duplicate the original cutters...and we kept getting supplied tungsten cutters designed to spin in routers at high speed with the cutter blade set at way too shallow an angle..(At slow speed it would push the timber away from the cutter under the offset round timber clamp mechanisms).

It is / was a masterpiece of German engineering.

Can't even find a pic of one on google images - can't be too many of them still around.

Would give my left leg to get it back today.