On Aug 29, 3:47 pm, (Scott Lurndal) wrote:
On Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:11:10 -0700, LEGEND65 wrote:
I am doing more small production runs of small dovetailed boxes,
between 6-9" length of sides and 3-5" high. Currently I do all the
sanding after assembly with a ROS (the small Festool) and then a bit
of hand sanding and with a stack of 20 boxes to go through 3 grits
it's not the least bit fun. If I could totally eliminate the ROS and
go straight to hand sanding that would be fantastic.

I clean up the dovetails on my boxes with a sharp low-angle jack plane
followed by a hand scraper. Just a touch of sanding required after that.

I do use a plane to flatten the bottoms of the boxes where I can, but
I'm dealing with knotty cedar. While I cut around knots to not have
any in the actual dovetails sometimes I have to take a bit off a side
and I can't get anywhere near it with anything with a blade. There
are probably people out there good enough with their hand tools to do
it, but I'm not one of them.