The Taylor Garage

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.

1. The Taylor Garage » Blog Archive » Cleaning, Space, and Dovetails says:

   May 29, 2010 at 11:16 pm

   [...] more than one, so I grabed a short piece of 3/4″ plywood that was about 4 inches wide.  My previous practice dovetailing was only a single tail, two half-pins and I wanted to cut a couple of [...]

   Reply to this Comment