Making a Dovetail Alignment Board

I'm planning on doing some short courses towards the end of the year at my workshop in Southampton. One of the projects will be on dovetailing, making this very useful alignment board.
Stage one is to shoot an edge and then carefully trim to width on the band saw, before shooting the other edge.

The board I've chosen is some lovely quarter sawn oak for stability and the cut was made using my sled on the table saw.

The cut needs to be exactly square so I lined the two pieces on a dead flat surface with no gap, as you would expect. By reversing one of the pieces if there is any deviation from square it will be doubled and immediately visible. Of course you can only use this technique if you've taken care to make sure the board was exactly the same width all the way along.

Again no gap so all is well.

Using my 1:6 magnetic guide and 372 saw the tails were cut and then chiselled out.

With the pins marked out and cut it all went together straight from the saw and was cleaned up with a smoother.

The dovetails don't really show until the first coat of finish is applied, in this case some Osmo hard wax oil. The board looks a treat and is ready for the side fences.