Many woodworkers consider hand-cut dovetails to be the end-all, be-all, holy grail of joinery. It is easy to understand why; they are simply beautiful, while being highly functional and strong. Matt Kenney of Fine Woodworking shared a fine example earlier today.
I’ve never cut a dovetail joint before. The closest I’ve come was a plan to use sliding dovetails for this bookshelf, but that ended up not coming to fruition. I haven’t put a whole lot of time into the study of the art of this joint (yet), but I’ve read several forum posts/blog entries and I’ve watched this video a couple of times. So here was my first shot:
Not the prettiest joint in the world, but to get anything beyond “Yep, it looks like dovetail” would be a coup in my book. Here you can see a nice gouge I created trying to clean up the tail:
Thankfully it looks a lot better from the “interesting” side of the joint:
Overall I’m happy with how things went. You can’t get better without practice and you can’t be practicing without the first practice. I know there are places for me to improve in my technique and tonight was the first step towards being able to actually use this joint in a real piece.
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[...] hand is a skill that I’ve wanted to improve for some time, but had only made minimal time to actually practice. As Frank Klausz has said - if you want to be good at cutting dovetails, go cut [...]