The picture looks familiar but I can't recall the details. I think there was a "wood puzzles" book which included this novelty joint. (Was it a book sold by Woodcraft?) Anyway, it's a curiosity. Check it out and tell all.
Apprentice". I couldn't begin to tell you how to do it without illustrations. :-) I've never attempted the dovetail.
| The picture looks familiar but I can't recall the details. I think | there was a "wood puzzles" book which included this novelty joint. | (Was it a book sold by Woodcraft?) Anyway, it's a curiosity. Check | it out and tell all. | |
-- Morris Dovey DeSoto Solar DeSoto, Iowa USA
I've seen puzzles like this before that were accomplished by soaking the wood until it got soft and pliable, positioning it, and then letting it dry. The one I remember is a wooden ball inside a cube that has square holes through each side (but just slightly too small for the ball). The cube is soaked and then "squeezed" around the ball.
Don't know if this is the trick for the dovetail, but that would be my guess.
Jack
Chita wrote:
Ah .. wait! I was staring at the picture and I just figured out a way that you could do this with solid pieces of wood without needing 'pliable' wood.
In the picture, there are brown and red woods dovetailed together. If you look at the red piece, imagine that the small strip of red wood at the top of the puzzle is in fact just that ... a small strip of wood.
That is, the two sides of the red piece are pretty much what you see, but the section between the two dovetailed brown pieces isn't there ... just a triangular "rod" connecting the two sides of the red piece.
Then ... you can easily "pivot" the red piece up around the brown dovetails.
The red rod connecting the two sides would need to be cut inwards to allow for the pivot, as would the bottom ends of the red piece that butt up against the brown piece.
Can you envision what I'm describing?
Jack
mywebaccts (at) PLUGcomcast.net wrote:
I've seen it as well. Both pieces are cut on a diagonal but when put together they look like a dovetail - though they really aren't (if memory serves...). I'd have to find the web page that breaks it all down too. I couldn't explain it any better right now than what I've just said.
"mywebaccts (at) PLUGcomcast.net" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@comcast.com...
That was my thought as well, but I don't think the other end would clear unless it was cut really really loose; and it doesn't look that way.
Yeah, there was an episode that talked about this joint. If you look a the end grain of the piece with the tail cut in it, it's a square cut which creates the illusion that it's a square cut all the way back to shoulders like a normal dovetail would be. That's impossible though. What's really going on is that the sides of both dovetails are beveled so that where the dovetail attached to the rest of the board, the sides of the tail are at a 45 degree angle. The board simply pushes straight in from the back. Between the two dovetails is sort of a V-shaped valley with a matching one on the other piece. It's difficult to describe, but easy to understand once you see it.
brian
I saw a Woodwrght's shop episode where Roy made one of these. Unlike the other trick dovetail (where the tails appear on all four faces of the joined pieces) this one required heavy clamping to bend the pieces when it was assembled. Other than that I can't recall any details. It is really secure, though - he used it for a mallet head.
That's a different puzzle. I doubt this one was by cutting on diagonals.
Could well be. Was pretty cool the way the effect worked though.
I haven't seen the actual mechanism. But one poster said clamping was needed, so perhaps it's a combination of sliding and clamping. So you may be right....
I thought the ball and cage was typically done by carving both from the same block of wood, carving the ball _inside_ the cage.
Not wood related, But I once worked for a CNC machine shop. To prove what the machines could do one of the owners machined the "ball in the cube" out of aluminum, about 2 inches square. It was surprising to see the end result. The ball was smooth, and measured with in .001 of round. All machined out of one piece, the ball inside the cage. Greg
I have seen it too, just as you describe. The end result is an illusion, so to speak. Our minds are trained to think a typical dovetail, but the wood is cut in a way to simulate a dovetail, when it is really a form of slip joint. Greg
don't confuse 'em, fred...
it's a good illusion, then. I can't see how it could be assembled, no matter what it looks like inside.
what are the dots for? why won't the ebay vendor let us see the underside?
OK - I'm going to give this a shot from memory. What you see is a box with apparently two dovetails - on adjacent sides. What's really there is a sliding joint. Imagine that the dovetail end you are seeing on one side runs to the other one you see. What makes the illusion work is that the ends of the dovetails are cut on an angle - even with the plane of the side of the box. If you looked at the box straight on, but looking into the corner instead of at one of the sides, you'd see the dovetail profile with the ends cut off-square. The top has the dovetail slot to match. It slides together.
Damn - I don't know if that made one bit of sense.
I posted a really crummy Word doc drawing of how this works on the binary group.
One possible way to make this joint would be for the hidden cuts to be circular arcs. The sort of thing that would result from a rotated (turned) piece which then has been cut with flat sides
The axis of rotation would be along a line on the surface between the labels A and B.
If so then there would be arc shaped cut inside (under) the arms of the T. This view is not given in the pictures.
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