After a few weeks getting our house in order, I’ve finally been able to spend some quality time with my tools.

I’m making a very simple magazine rack. My hope is that it will hold my New Scientist and American Mind magazines, but I fear it will end up stuffed with Marie Claire and New Idea instead.

After planning the project and measurements, I began by cutting the pieces that will form the “walls” of the rack. The Festool power tool system came into great effect and use here. In the picture below I have a piece of Tasmanian Oak ready to be cut to length. The Festool TS-55 saw, guide rail and the combination angle make this really easy. The thing I love about it is that you don’t need to worry about drawing your cut line perfectly square. The combination angle attaches to the guide rail. One arm of it sits along the length of the timber keeping it at the your desired angle. Then the saw glides along the rail ensuring your cut is at the perfect angle.

Next came the tricky bit, dovetails. I’m using a dovetail joint to attach the bottom rails to the walls. I haven’t done work like this before so I put my trust again into the Festool system. I also built a little jig to help me keep the joints uniform and repeatable.

Unfortunately, my first results were terrible. I might as well have bashed the hole out with a hammer it was that bad. Perhaps it was my lack of skill, or the fact that I was going about it all wrong. I know you can produce excellent dovetails with the Festool system and a dovetail jig, but I didn’t have the jig and was also a little impatient.

The main issue was the huge tearout the router caused on the right end of the dovetail. I thought about it and realised that as the router bit reached the right hand side, the clockwise rotation of the bit pushed out the wood fibres and caused them to split.

My solution was go back to hand tools. Something I’m not very practiced with yet but am looking to do more of. With a tenon saw, I cut the ends of the dovetail first at exactly the right angle. I then placed the piece into the jig and used the router to clear out the hole. This had significantly better results and gave me a really nice clean edge and flat bottom. It became very clear to me that power tools, although faster, are certainly not always the best tool for the job.