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The furniture record shows us that “perfect dovetails” is a modern mania. As the photos of antiques above prove, even some of the ugliest joints will stay together for a very long [...]

Through dovetails—for woodworkers, this is batting in the big leagues, isn’t it? Cutting them by hand certainly requires skill and practice, but if you use a well-designed router jig, almost [...]

  When beginning woodworkers rank the difficulty of the different dovetail joints, they usually think of the through-dovetail as the “bunny slope.” The half-blind dovetail is the “expert slope” – [...]

The alway-eagle-eyed Jeff Burks pointed out that I had already found an earlier reference to using a bow saw to saw out dovetail waste to the one I posted this morning. Back in 2010, I mentioned [...]

When I teach dovetailing to a class, one of the common questions is why I saw out the majority of the waste between the tails and pins, instead of chopping with a chisel. The simple answer is: [...]

When I teach woodworking, most of my job is diagnosing defective dovetails. Tail walls that are not 90°. Floors of pin and tail boards that have lumps aplenty. My diagnosis tools are my sensitive [...]

If you think there are hard-and-fast rules about designing dovetails, don’t read any further. You’ll get an ulcer. North Carolina woodworker Mark Firley has collected a set of 472 photos of [...]

I’ve looked at, photographed and cut many dovetails throughout my days as a woodworker, book author and magazine editor. I’ve written on this blog at least once in the past that the [...]

When I talk to woodworkers about drawers, particularly dovetail joinery, I mention the transition that occurs as we moved from one furniture period to the next. In general, dovetails became a [...]

Years ago, I stumbled upon this woodworking jig. Years since, it still ranks high in usage when I’m working on a large number of dovetails (but I generally teach and make hand-cut [...]

It’s Sunday, and I’m at work to process lumber so that I can get started on a project that involves 44 half-blind dovetails for the October issue of the magazine. And it’s [...]

I spend hours looking at photos of furniture. If I don’t have my nose buried in books, I gaze upon photos sent to me by other woodworkers. In a flickr set sent to me by Mark Firley (thanks, [...]