Time for me to buy a dovetail jig. Is it necessar to spend a bundle? I have a Porter-Cable 690 router. What are the options? It looks like Leigh D4R or D1600 are the current way to go. Expensive, good, but are they the best value? My first projects will be drawers and boxes. Thoughts from those who actually use this set up and or make machined/hand dovetails would be greatly appreciated.
Well, those Leigh jigs look really nice, but pretty pricey as well. You also pay a lot for the privilege of having the capability to do 16" or
24" joints. Do you really need that for drawers and such?I'm very happy with my Porter-Cable 4210 (12" capacity), which can be found for a hundred bucks or so. Of course, if money was no object, I guess I'd go with the Leigh.
Alan Smithee wrote: > Time for me to buy a dovetail jig. Is it necessar to spend a bundle? I have > a Porter-Cable 690 router.
I recently purchased a 12" JET from Amazon which was very cost effective when you factored in the discounts.
On the surface, it may look like a lot of other Far East knockoffs, but it is well made, relatively easy to set up, IF you keep your wits about you and follow the instruction manual.
I used it to make 34 dovetail joints which varied from 4" to 10" for a chest of drawers using a PC690 equipped with a 7/16" brass guide bushing and a 14 degree dovetail bit, both of which you will need to purchase separately.
If I had it to do over, I'd buy the JET again.
Have fun.
Lew
You forgot to tell him the JET only does half blind dovetails?
Check out the latest issue of Fine Woodworking for their review.
I have the P-C jig and it works very well. I wanted to be able to do full dovetails, and some others only did the half blind ones. Set up wasn't bad, and once done, you can do a ton of dove tails for drawers in a short period of time. I question whether the extra money for the Leigh would be worth it. There is a tendency here to always go "Rolls-Royce" when a Corvette is all you need for some serious overkill.
I was fortunate enough to have been gifted an Akeda jig with all the goodies. I love it. Set up is VERY easy and I made perfect through dovetails on the first try. set up took a couple minutes. It took me more time to read the instructions than to make the joints. I'd recommend the jig to anyone. Cost like the leigh is high but well worth the money (if you have to pay for it) (sorry I had to gloat a bit).
I bought a Leigh D4 about three years ago. It works great, and I'm glad I have it -- but, just the same, if I'm making only a single shallow drawer, I'll hand-cut the dovetails. In the time it takes to get the jig out, set it up, get the router adjusted, cut a couple of test pieces, test-fit them, tweak the router a bit, cut a couple more test pieces, and test-fit them -- I'm more than half-way done with the handcut joints. OTOH, for a single *deep* drawer, I'll turn to the Leigh jig every time.
And for anything approaching a production run -- like when I re-did my kitchen two years ago -- the Leigh is hard to beat. It's a pretty good-sized kitchen, with 21 drawers and 36 pull-out trays in the base cabinets (also dovetailed), and I'm *very* glad I didn't try to hand-cut all 228 dovetail joints!
I have a Porter Cable 4112 in new condition. Used once. $35.00 plus shipping and it's yours.
I looking at it now....thx...
Buy the Akeda Jig.
I bought two sizes of dovetail finger plates and screwed it to two blocks wood like this...
After many hints and open catalogs left lying in conspicuous places, my dear wife bought me a Leigh D1600 for fathers day. Even a butcher like me can make excellent joints with it. One of the magazines (Fine Woodworking) just did a product review in their last issue. The D4R and D1600 were rated "best overall", and the Porter-Cable 4212 captured "best value".
Here's a bargain for you.
<Seems too good to be true? It's not--it does everything they say and a good deal more for 60 bucks. It was a good deal at 200 bucks, for 60 it's amazing.
Major limitations are that it can't cut stock more than about 8 inches wide, at least not without doing some fiddling, that it's slower than the Leigh etc, that it requires a router table, and that you move the stock, not the router, which can be a problem with large boards.
To get a feel for what it can do try some of the projects in <
The 8 inch original model has some bigger brothers <
Even if you end up going with the Leigh after trying the 60 buck Incra you'll find that it remains a useful tool. I have a larger Incra jig on my router table now and use the small one as a general purpose precision positioner--it's handy with the table saw and with the drill press, so that
60 bucks won't be wasted.
Let there be NO doubt that the Leigh is "worth it" if one is more serious about woodworking than the average weekend warrior, or if woodworking is a source of income.
I pulled out the long dollar and bought a D4R based on discussions with other users, much of it here. My main priorities were:
- Adjustable spacing
- Half & through DT's
- Ease of setup and use
The D4R has totally blown me away, and I'd buy it again. I wouldn't call it "easy" to use, but the manual is probably the best written, easiest to follow example of documentation I've EVER seen. If I follow ALL the steps, in the order written, I get perfect results every time.
I didn't think I'd need the width, but I've learned to use both ends for different setups.
I _still_ haven't even bothered to watch the DVD included with the jig. The manual is that good!
If you only need one kind of DT, or don't care about spacing, save money and look elsewhere. The D4R fits my requirements, yours may be different.
Yeah it's a definite contender....but I'm Canadian so the Leigh might have the advantage...I like the thinking in the Akeda though...hmmm
I'm thinking the Leigh (or the Akeda) would pay for itself on the first freelance job...
Depends on your needs but the Porter Cable would be hard to beat for the money.
For garden variety work, the above jig is quite nice and is currently about $169.
The Leigh is a fine jig but I find that a jig with a
400 page manual is just a wee bit much. I also think that it is vastly overpriced.Norm is probably responsible for that since he made it famous.
Alan Smithee wrote:
Have you used the jig?
I only ask because the manual has discrete sections, which you use based on the particular joint you need to cut. Some of the information is repeated in every section. Once you've cut a type of DT, the next pass through the manual is more like a checklist vs. a detailed read. A good
30-40 pages of the manual is devoted to initial assembly, and another large chunk is devoted to detailed theory of how each operation works. Typical operations are 8-10 pages long.Had I not used the jig, I'd agree with you about the daunting size of the manual. I still haven't bothered to read the theory sections.
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