Dovetails for Dummies

Try cutting that with a straight bit, Cam

A lot of the staffers here at the Antisocial Network dabble from time to time in woodworking, which is probably why there's a boatload of nominations on the site for clueless freelancers trying to explain how to make things out of wood, even though the freelancer would be hard-pressed to tell CDX plywood from solid walnut. Yes, they're bitter...  anyway, one of them ran across some content scribbled down at eHow.com by one of the more clueless freelancers, a yutz named Cameron Easey. This time out, Easey pretended to know, "How to Make Dovetail Joints With a Router"¹ for OurPastimes.com.

He didn't. Hell, even though Cameron had managed to find a link to a website titled "Easy to Make Box Joints & Dovetails," he was so unfamiliar with the task he didn't even crib the right directions!
In the first place, Cameron (here making his seventh trip to the DotD podium) kinda dropped into the middle of a "class" on how to use a router, neglecting to include any information about the setup that the site's authors used. That's why his list of "Things You'll Need" included something he called a,

"1/2-inch or 3/8-inch spacer fence"

Of course, if you hadn't been following along with the router guys, you'd have no idea what this "spacer fence" thingy is, and it's for damned sure you wouldn't have one lying around (and you can't buy one at Rockler or Amazon, either). That pales, however, along the utter stupidity of Cameron's other "thing you'll need":

"1/2-inch or 3/8-inch straight bits..."

...which you're going to use in your

"Table mounted router"

We suppose that somewhere, someone has a "table-mounted router" as opposed to a router mounted in a table. But let's go back to those "straight bits" for a minute. Did this moron actually think you can cut dovetails with a straight bit????

Yes, apparently Easey did. Clearly, our Dumbass of the Day did not realize that the bottom half of the page was all about dovetails, while the portion of the website he "borrowed" from (copiously) was about making box joints. Like Alexis Rohlin (and Lauren Vork) before him, Cameron had no idea what the difference was.

Yet this rubbish persisted on the 'net in the eHow.com canon, where it rested for more than ten years. Mother lode of misinformation, indeed.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_6736272_make-dovetail-joints-router.html

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