The Akeda DC-16 Dovetail Jig: So, pigs can fly!

Before I get to the matter at hand, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Kevan Lear of Akeda Jigs and Peter Collins of Woodcraft for allowing me the opportunity to review the DC-16. I had great fun doing it. Thanks fellas.

I am in awe of the dovetail, especially the hand cut variety. There is nothing as beautiful as a well executed half blind dovetail crafted by a practiced hand. I have spent the last dozen years researching, learning, and practicing - trying to produce just that - and I believe I have been successful in that endeavor. For years jigs have been available to make dovetailing a quick and simple process, but I have always found the claims to be greater than the evidence could bear. A skilled furniture maker will make joints that are somewhat imperfect, no matter how adroit he is with a saw, and the somewhat irregular spacing or shape of the pins found in hand cut dovetails is lost in the cookie cutter joints churned out by most jigs. Some eleven years ago I looked into the purchase of a dovetail jig and found that either results were obviously machined, or the jigs were surprisingly expensive, and they were not as easy to use as advertised. Since then I have been a hand cut dovetail zealot.

Recently, with a number of larger projects on the horizon, I revisited the idea of the dovetail jig after seeing an intriguing ad from Akeda Jigs. Spurred on by their claims I decided to do a little research, but being quite busy at the time the whole issue was placed on hold until last December when I was contacted by Kevan Lear, President of Akeda Jigs and the inventor. He had an Akeda DC-16 and DC Accessory Kit sent my way so that I could take it for a test drive and write this review. How could I refuse? I started out by comparing the Akeda to the only other jig I would consider, the Leigh D-4.

Contents

• Things Important To Me As A Consumer
• Shopping Around
• First Impressions
• Cutting Through Dovetails
• Eliminating Through Dovetail Tearout
• Observations After Cutting Through Dovetails
• Half Blind Dovetails
• Running Into Trouble?
• Things Learned While Half Blind Dovetailing
• Hand Cutting For Comparison: The Real Test
• Addressing Some Concerns of Others
• Akeda's Claims Revisited
• In Conclusion

Things Important To Me As A Consumer    [Contents]

It would be prudent to add here that I aspire to be something of a builder of finely crafted furniture. I don't consider myself a master by any stretch, but it is important that a jig, aside from churning out kitchen cabinet drawers by the score, be able to at least approximate the look of a hand cut dovetail. If I choose to use the jig rather than cut the joint by hand, I don’t want my decision to detract from the overall look, feel , and quality of the finished piece. In any case, I have no real experience with dovetails jigs so I am approaching this subject much like a fledgling woodworker might.

If I am going to want to buy and use a dovetail jig, there are several criteria that it must meet before I would lay down any money. First, the jig must be easy to use. If the router wobbles away on top of it, forget it. I don't want to lay out cash for something I have to fiddle with for a couple hours just to get one corner cut, then it isn't setup properly for a different style of joint. Second, I want to be able to get most everything in a package deal, without having to fill a shopping cart with boxes of individual parts. Third, when I get it set up, it must be able to repeat the joints I want with a minimum of fuss for a whole kitchen, or two, full of drawers, and even then the first set and the last set must be identical. Finally, the result must approximate the look of a hand cut dovetail. I have to be able to create pin angles that are traditional, and space them out to create the desired effect.

Shopping Around    [Contents]

Keeping that in mind, I decided to make a quick comparison based on instruction manuals and packaging, catalog and internet advertisements, and information found in the newsgroups and in magazines. Needless to say, the fact that the Akeda is so new, made finding information difficult. Basing my quick comparison on a chart found on the Akeda website, I plotted everything of importance to me in the following table.

This table is not exhaustive and reflects my personal needs and wants. It is important to add that the Akeda boasts other features not available on the Leigh such as one handed clamping, built in stops for positioning the wood, a choice of pin angles, full support for the router base, no extra setup for rabbetted front edges, and no adjustments required for the jig. Buying into all this I immersed myself in testing.

First Impressions    [Contents]

My first impressions were very favorable. The jig arrived well packed and undamaged. Obviously a great deal of thought went into this oft overlooked aspect of marketing - a good sign. The label on the outside sports a complete list of all of the contents and a list of everything not included that you require to make it work. Packaging is substantial and tight fitting with nothing left to roll around or vibrate loose, even for the smallest of parts. To my surprise, the jig itself is heavy - heavy enough to seriously aggravate my carpal tunnel - and built to withstand punishment. I was actually very impressed with the quality of construction, and the fit and finish of all of the parts sent to me. The cutters are nicely milled with plenty of well seated carbide. The clamping mechanism is easy to use and strong. The jig itself provides a large surface area on which the router can rest which is one of the things I dislike about most router jigs. Generally speaking the heft and feel of the unit, along with it's simplicity, are deceptive - I suspected the true nature of the Akeda being one of much greater functionality.

The setup was a snap, quite literally (finding the center of the sub base board took longer to do). After cutting a piece of pine to the correct measurements for a sub base and attaching it with the mounting bolts provided, all that was left was to snap on the dust collector parts, clamp the jig to the bench and prepare to cut dovetails. I had delusions of reading through everything in the manual before doing anything (more about why that was not a good idea later) but I decided just to jump in with both feet. Having already prepared some pine for the purpose, I just followed the steps and started cutting. I went from a boxed unit to a completed through dovetail corner in under half an hour.

Cutting Through Dovetails    [Contents]

My first set of through dovetails were not without fault. The pins and tails were running a little shallow (requiring a slight depth of cut adjustment), I had quite a bit of tearout, and my spacing was weird. The first thing I learned is that although the Akeda requires no adjustment, you might have to adjust the depth of cut a little for a good fit. That isn't as onerous as it sounds because it is only one adjustment, not an addition of errors over several adjustments. Once I adjusted the depth of cut and the guide fingers, I just had to find a way to cut away the waste without producing the tearout.

A second set produced a nice tight fit with the pins and tails a little proud, just the way I like it. The spacing was good but I still had some tearout. Pine is a resinous wood that I like to describe as "stringy". Obviously these router bits are new so they are very sharp. The chips being pulled off of the workpiece were long and stringy, and this type of wood tends to tear out more than some other species. There is very little you can do when cutting the tails, as you are removing very little waste. The trick to handling tearout is the manner in which you push the bit through the large amount of waste that needs to be removed when routing the pin board. I came up with a simple routine for through dovetails that virtually eliminates all tearout in all species tried - the half blind dovetail pins don't present a problem with tearout. When routing the tails using the dovetail bit, just push through the back side as slow as you can. When hogging out the majority of the waste between the pins with the straight cutter, follow the procedure below.

Eliminating Through Dovetail Tearout    [Contents]

1. Working from left to right, feed the bit into the wood, guide bushing pressed against the leftmost guide, until the chatter stops and you notice the RPMs have dropped. The whine of the motor (its pitch) should drop but not too much - just enough for a comfortable load on the router. The bit will probably have cut into the wood to nearly half its diameter. Then, listening to the motor to keep the pitch even, guide the router across the front of the waste area to be cut until the guide bushing contacts the guide on the right.
2. Keeping the guide bushing against the right guide and listening to keep the motor pitch even, push the router along the right guide and slowly break through the back of the wood.
3. Repeat step 1, except you are moving the router from right to left across the back side of the board. On the back side you have to move in the opposite direction because of the clockwise rotation of the motor shaft. This is how you can eliminate tearout without climb cutting - which isn't good for bits and is somewhat dangerous.
4. Once you reach the leftmost guide, slowly draw the router back toward you to break through the front.
5. Lastly, cut out the middle waste by moving the router in concentric circles in a counter clockwise fashion cutting partway into the waste to be removed. Try to keep the feed rate and the motor pitch even. Don't just plow through as that is hard on the bit and the router.

I suppose all this has been the long way around the barn of saying that you just want to move the router counter clockwise nibbling out a little bit a time between the guides.

Observations After Cutting Through Dovetails    [Contents]

While testing various methods of dealing with tearout, I made several sets of dovetails of the same size and pattern. The repeatability of the Akeda allowed me cut set after set quickly so that I only had to concentrate on my technique. The results were all uniform and the guides performed flawlessly.

For the sake of continuity, I would like to make a couple of other points here. First, the viewing screen is supposed to be removed and turned inward when using the dust collection attachment. Especially when cutting resinous woods, this caused a lot of clogging. Leaving the viewing screen in its original position allowed for much cleaner operation. My ShopVac is a 5 hp model and has enough suction to handle it. If yours doesn't, then the little bit of suction increase you may get from turning the panel inside out may help.

Setting cutter heights for through dovetails also proved to be problematic for me when following the instructions. To remedy this I just inverted the router on the bench, placed a couple of the tail guides on the base plate, then set my wood on top of it. Rotating the base of the router, I adjusted the blade height to just a 64^th above the wood. That leaves the pin ends and tails ends slightly proud of the sides of the box. I just finish them off with a No. 4 Bailey pattern plane.

A Better Way to Set Bit Depth

Kevan Lear of Akeda Jigs clued me in to a much easier way of setting bit depth. First clamp one of the boards you intend to through dovetail into the horizontal clamp of the jig. Set your router on top and simply adjust until you reach the depth of the wood, plus a little extra for cleanup.

I personally found the cord holder a nuisance, but after years of routing I have sort of a built in way of holding the router so the cord isn't a problem. I tried to come up with a way of describing it but I can't. I just do it.

Half Blind Dovetails    [Contents]

Once I was satisfied with the results I was getting for through dovetails, I moved on to half blind dovetails. The instruction manual is written the opposite way, but people usually learn to hand cut the through variety first, believing that there is something mysterious about the half blind dovetail. In actuality, I find the half blind type easier and faster to cut.

As long as you follow the instructions for cutting the tails and remember that the vertical clamping mechanism has two stops, your tail boards are easy and fast to cut - much like the procedure for through dovetails. The sockets between the pins are simple too but the instructions tell you to use the drawer side to gauge how far out from under the rear guide rail (now you are clamping horizontally) the drawer front should protrude. Nonsense! That is far too much fiddling around for me. A more elegant solution is drawn from tradition. A marking gauge set to the width of the drawer side can be used to scribe a line on the back side of the drawer front. That line is a much simpler and effective method of gauging where to place the drawer front under the rear guide rail.

The marking gauge was also useful in setting the depth of cut for the bit. The instruction manual contains a chart indicating which bit to use and how far to set it based on the thickness of the drawer front. Using the depth of cut given, and subtracting from it the 1/2 inch thickness of the guide fingers, I set my marking gauge to the reduced measurement and scribed a line on the side of the drawer front. Setting the router up on end on the bench I placed a couple guide fingers on the base plate, then positioned the wood on top of it. It was short work to adjust the router to the scribed line.

Running Into Trouble?    [Contents]

I cut out my first set of half blind dovetails. The result, however, was less than acceptable. Before jumping to any conclusions, I should point out that I used offcuts from my pile for all these tests, thus it is only natural that some of them are less than ideal. My first test was done using tulipwood for the drawer side and a piece of some kind of oak for the front. That slab of oak was the hardest piece of wood I have ever seen in my life. It was so hard the router had trouble cutting it, and as a result, the excessive chattering made the bit slip in the collet (necessitating resetting of the bit which subsequently made the fit loose), and the drawer front slip in the jig several times. If you are using really hard wood, I suggest you give extra clamping pressure, check for slippage after milling each tail socket, and learn to nibble. You can't satisfactorily resurrect the joint after the bit has slipped or if the wood moves in the jig - at least without a great deal of extra time and effort.

After switching to some much softer Honduras mahogany, I was able to repeat the joint with the same settings and achieve a much greater degree of success. Again, the product was not perfect as the joint was a little loose. The manual indicates that lowering the bit should fix this problem, and it did. I cut another joint with the bit lowered just a little and the outcome was perfect. The manual also suggests that you test your half blind dovetails, or any dovetails for that matter, on scrap before committing to your carefully prepared stock. I agree and can't stress the importance of this strenuously enough. This is why the prepared woodworker always surfaces a little more stock than is necessary for the project. The extra wood will allow for replacement of parts you ruined, and gives you some wood to experiment on when testing out the setup of your jigs. Once I had the setup all figured out, I probably could have run the half blind dovetails on an entire kitchen full of drawers, say ten to fifteen drawers, in under an hour - with a consistent, tight fit on every drawer.

Things Learned While Half Blind Dovetailing    [Contents]

I'd like to thrown in a housekeeping reminder: It was about this point I realized that every so often you need to use some compressed air or a soft bristle brush to clean out the little guide finger registers on the inside of the rear guide rail. This will keep the sawdust from interfering with the removal and installation of the guide fingers.

Something I noticed is that following the manual's recommendations for where to place the guides at the ends of the board left a rather clunky and large half pin on the drawer fronts. The reason I bring this up is that the completed joint didn't quite have that hand cut look, so I disobeyed the written instructions and moved them closer to the end - the left most guide right on the reference mark rather than an eighth to a quarter inch away. I also changed the pin spacing to look more like the spacing I would use if I were to layout those particular pieces for hand cutting. The result was excellent. I achieved a perfect fit and the spacing looked as close to hand cut as you can get, without actually cutting the dovetails by hand.

Hand Cutting For Comparison: The Real Test    [Contents]

So, to finish off my testing I decided to take some tulipwood and mahogany, of similar dimensions, and hand cut a set of half blind dovetails for comparison. Some cleanup was necessary to clear the decks for action, and out came my old jig. Hand cut dovetails aren't rocket science but they require different skills. Please remember for the next section, I am concentrating on one corner. If you are hand cutting these joints you normally work on several joints at once to make things more efficient. Time didn't allow for me to produce anything larger.

First I mark out 2/3 to 2/4 the thickness of the drawer front on the side of the drawer front. Then I transfer that measurement all around the front end of the drawer side. After setting the marking gauge to the thickness of the drawer side I scribe a line on the back side of the drawer front. I lay out the pins with dividers and use a bevel, set approximately to a 1:6 ratio, to scribe out my pins with a marking knife. Then I saw the pins. I cut down the side of the pin inside the joint with a hammer and an old scraper then I begin chopping out the waste. Here is a drawer front partially finished. Once the waste is gone and I have finished the drawer front, I use the pins to directly transfer the layout to the drawer side, marking them with a knife. After sawing out the tails on the drawer side, it is time to chop them out. If you trust your layout, everything should fit right the first time, and it did.

Setting my latest machine cut dovetails next to the hand cut set you can see that the Akeda can make dovetails that look almost hand made. A close-up shot of the Akeda set shows that while everything is perfectly shaped, the layout and spacing are excellent and would be at home in any piece of fine furniture. (I left the pins long on purpose. Since the joint is not yet glued, I haven't performed the usual cleanup with a bench plane.) The hand cut dovetails show some irregularities, as must be expected from handwork, but it has no characteristics other than that to distinguish itself. In the end, the Akeda satisfies all my criteria and would make an excellent addition to my shop.

Addressing Some Concerns of Others    [Contents]

As mentioned previously, I did spend some time in the recent past looking through the comments of others on newsgroups and internet forums and I would like to take this opportunity to address some of the concerns I have heard expressed. The Akeda's guide pins are restricted to movements in 1/8 inch increments whereas other jigs, or so I have heard, have no such restrictions. I found in a couple of samples I milled, if there is a little unevenness in spacing, the effect can actually lead to a more hand cut look. I think you can pick anything apart enough if you want to: the bottom line is that you can work around this slight limitation with great ease.

Some have expressed concern over the longevity of the plastic guide pins. The fingers are somewhat difficult to insert at first and get easier after a few insertions. This is not to say that they wear out. I have used some of the guide fingers scores of times now and they reach a point where they become easier and faster to install and remove but never got loose or unusable. I was actually very impressed with their quality and I think they will last quite well.

The Akeda does come with a great many small parts but I think this is rather more of an opportunity to design a storage system, perhaps using the jig itself, to keep all the pieces together and readily available while you are using the jig.

I have heard the instruction manual described as less than adequate but I found it to be easy to follow and the writers seemed to anticipate every question I had. The size, shape and binding were very handy in the shop.

One of the problems people have experienced with the jig is an improper fit produced through inaccuracy in the sizing of their guide bushing. I am very fortunate to have sidestepped this problem as the 7/16 inch bushing I had already works perfectly. I did measure it before use with my vernier calipers and it measured exactly 7/16 of an inch. I would recommend that you check this first as I understand the issue has caused some frustration. Unfortunately the quality control in the production of many of these guide bushings is lacking creating many reports of 7/16 bushings being as much as 1/32 of an inch out in either direction. If you don’t already have one, take your calipers with you when you buy it, or insist that the store proves to you that it is within the tolerances allowed. As long as you aren't more than a couple thousandths out I understand you will be fine (I would double check this information as I don’t recall where I heard that at this time). Nevertheless, if you pay for a 7/16 inch bushing it should be exactly 7/16 of an inch.

A Solution to the Guide Bushing Problem

After writing this review I learned that, due to the guide bushing quality control problem, Akeda has begun manufacturing a guide bushing machined to tolerances higher than most available on the market. Woodcraft carries them. This should eliminate any problems you have been facing if your guide bushing is slightly too large or too small.

Akeda's Claims Revisited    [Contents]

Akeda Jigs has made a number of claims about this jig which must be addressed. The jig itself is free of adjustment but that does not mean that no adjustment of any kind is required. The adjustment has been limited to the cutter which I find to be a great innovation. The greater the number of adjustment points the greater the probability of cumulative error. By restricting adjustment to just the bit, you have all but eliminated that kind of error.

The structure of the Akeda, specifically the large platform on which the router rests makes using this jig very safe. Most jigs do not provide enough support for the router and if it can wobble on top of the jig you are introducing another error source and creating a safety hazard. The enclosed nature of the Akeda and the materials used in the construction of the parts that may come into contact with the cutter also add greatly to the operator's personal safety.

I was truly impressed with the clamping system, but watch out if you get a piece of wood that is super hard like the one I used. A piece like that will knock itself out of just about any clamp, however.

In Conclusion    [Contents]

I am in somewhat of an awkward position - I have been going around shooting off my mouth for years about hand cutting being the only method of producing dovetails. I guess I am going to have to fire up the grill and prepare to eat a little crow. It serves me right. I didn't take to the Akeda right off however. Cutting dovetails are a true exercise in 3-dimensional thinking and the difference in methodology when using a jig requires an adjustment in one's frame of mind, which is why I had problems with reading through the manual before using it. Once it clicked using the jig became quite fun and fast. If you are relatively new to woodworking you won't have to overcome than mindset, rather you will probably take to the Akeda like the proverbial duck to water.

The Akeda is an investment, but so is any tool when woodworking. I used a $170 saw to cut the dovetails I used for comparison in this article. The trick is to make the right investment for you so that you buy what you need to do the things you want to do. Whether you are looking to redo your kitchen or build nice furniture, I believe that this jig will work for you. The Akeda is a quality product, built by some fine folks, and has a great deal more versatility that I was able to demonstrate for you here. It will do what you ask it to do, reliably, consistently and easily.

In my opinion, the Akeda is everything that it has been advertised to be. It is easy to use and makes dovetailing fun. The safe, repeatable results easily approximate the look of hand cut dovetails with all the quality - all this with fewer steps and procedures, and in a shorter period of time. I would like to see Frank Klausz dovetail a drawer alongside someone familiar with the Akeda. It would be fun and, I think, a toss up as to who would be done first. Not that I am volunteering but if I had this review to do over again I think I would watch the clock more closely - the data generated would certainly be interesting. You can cut a lot of joints in very little time with this jig and the results speak for themselves. The Akeda does make joints as well as can be made by hand, that look so close you have to squint to tell them apart. I highly recommend it: it's worth every penny.

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