A couple of years ago, we had a program by Hank VonHollen on his universal joining jig.   I ended up buying one and going to the class at Keith Neer's place.   Then it was a while before I had a need for it.

For the life of me, I can't get my head around it.   The light has just not come on yet.  I have yet to understand how to take a side height, select the right chart, and determine which guides to use to get it to come out right, then when I think I have it, I have a hard time setting up the pin cuts to get them to line up with the tails I've just cut.

Can anyone elucidate me?

Keith,
It's been too long since I used it also. I suggest you contact George Murphy. I think he used it enough that he designed a dust collection port for it.

Maybe I'm stubborn, but was not about to let this thing get the best of me.

I finally sat down with several of the charts and scaled diagrams and drew out and derived how he got some of those numbers and dimensions.

I had several hurdles.
- The "normal" mode is half-tails on the edges. For drawers, you want half pins.
- On the class handouts, there are charts for half pins, half-tails, starting with a pin an ending with a tail, and starting with a tail and ending with a pin.
- On those charts, there are gaps in the drawer sizes you can successfully make, and my drawers (size already determined) are in those gaps
- My drawers were spec'd in metric. It worked out well to design them this way, but now I have to keep the rover from crashing into Mars.


Armed with new knowledge, I drew out full-scale diagrams of standard spacing and cuts. My plan now is to center my drawer stock on my diagram and just have beefy half pins where needed.

Worked like a champ.   The other key is "mind your reference surfaces."  Tails get cut with the reference surface away from the fixture; pins get cut with the reference surface toward the fixture.

Unlike other dovetail jigs where you use both left and right sides of the fixture, this one you always cut from the left.


It doesn't hurt to mark your pins before cutting them just to keep from making a mistake.