3 Ways to Improve Your Dovetails

None of them involve expensive tools

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There are a great many steps to making a single dovetail joint, from milling the parts so that they are “six square” to laying out the tails to cutting the pins to gluing the tail and pin boards together. Certainly, you could write a thorough explanation of the joint, explaining each step in granular detail, but such an account might lose the forest for the trees. Still, I think I’ll add a series of posts explaining how I cut dovetails to my big to-do list. Today, I am going to focus only on the three things that helped my move from “pretty good” dovetails to “damn, those are nice” dovetails.

At this moment, you might say to yourself, “I’m pretty sure this jamoke once wrote about how dovetails are overrated.” You are correct. I did. Still, it’s an important joint, so I’m going to share what helped me improve mine.

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First, let me say this: You will will not cut better dovetails if you buy a fancy handsaw or a dovetail blade for you tablesaw. Nor will you cut them better by laying them out with a set of dividers. It really doesn’t matter if you can cut to line with a backsaw, or make a slick jig for routing the pins. When it comes to dovetails, the rubber meets the road when you transfer the tails to pin board, and when you fit the pins. A clean shoulder line is also important.