My brother recently purchased and old piece of furniture at a garage sale.
What is unique about it is the joints for the drawers. The "dovetail" joints are half round, such that the edge gives a scalloped appearance. In the middle of each of the half rounds is a peg. I assume it goes through the two piece of the joint, but did not disassemble the drawer. (My brother was watching)
Is there a special jig for this type of "dovetail"?
Is there an advantage, other than appearance?
Its called a Knapp joint.
From here:
Their presence allows dating of the furniture chest to 1870 - 1900, usually of the Victorian, Renaissance Revival or Eastlake styles. In the dating sequence of furniture construction they generally followed hand-cut dovetails. They clearly pre-dated what is called "sliding French dovetails".
Hand made dovetailed drawers were very labor intensive and limited mass production of chests. The Knapp Joint is the first known mechanization for making drawers in the industrial revolution age.
The inventor was Charles B Knapp of Waterloo, Wisconsin with a patent dated
1867. There was by 1871 a Knapp Dovetailing Company of Northampton, Mass. The joint concept fell into lack of use by 1900....
Yeah, these are really cool joints. They are a Knapp or Crescent or Pin and Crescent and there are actually a few variations I've seen. You can jig up to make these yourself. I think someone makes a simple static jig but can't recall where i saw it. Also, the Woodworkers supply knock-off of the Multirouter has a template for making these. It would only cost a few thou to get the matcher, template, etc. ;^)
See l> My brother recently purchased and old piece of furniture at a garage sale= . >
Ouch! I did a variation with round pins - then revised to use lozenge-shaped pins. For less than $1K you can build the CNC to make any of these joints. IIRC, the part programs took less than an hour to hand code and allow varying the pin geometry (length and thickness) and spacing. Been promising myself for a couple of years now to try '+' (and spade/heart/diamond/club) shaped pins. :)
Thank you very much for the information. I passed it on to him. from the information on the patent dated and the date it fell into disuse, it will also help date the piece.
Leigh sells several templates for similar joints for their dovetail joint jigs.
-Zz
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