Ninety Dovetails
A few years ago I cut one dovetail joint a day for ninety days. Pine, because it’s cheap and it cuts easy. The first ones took me an hour. By the end I was down to fifteen or twenty minutes, laying one out and cutting it without thinking much about it. I stacked them on a shelf above the shop window, and they sat up there for years, and then one day I threw them all away.
I’m glad I did it. I set out to make my dovetails look like my instructors’ and by the end of it they mostly did. But I want to be careful about what that ninety days actually proved. It proved I can cut a dovetail. It didn’t prove a drawer needs one, and it didn’t prove I’m a good woodworker.
Those are three separate claims and we collapse them constantly.
If you learn woodworking the way most people do now, which is to say on YouTube and Instagram and in the magazines, you’d be forgiven for thinking the dovetail is the entry exam. It’s everywhere. Half-blind, through, mitered, hand-cut to a knife line with a camera six inches from the chisel. I’m not accusing anybody of anything. Hard joinery is interesting to watch, and the people making that stuff are showing you their best work, which is what anybody would do. But add it all up and you get a bar. The bar is in the wrong place.
You can build furniture for forty years and never need a dovetail. Most of what we make as hobbyists is shop cabinets, shelves, drawers and boxes, and all of that holds together fine with joints that are faster, stronger in some cases, and invisible to everyone who will ever see the piece. Your friends and family are not looking at the corners. They’re impressed you built a thing at all, and they should be. Another woodworker might notice. You’ll notice. That’s the whole audience.
Which is a legitimate reason to cut one. Cut them for yourself, cut them for the skill, cut them because you like how they look. Just know that’s the reason, and don’t confuse it with necessity.
Here’s what happens when we do confuse it. We used to teach the whiskey cabinet class with a dovetailed carcase. It’s already a demanding project, with a frame-and-panel door and marquetry on the front, and the dovetails sat right at the beginning. People would come to every session. They’d stay through the whole class. And then they’d set the project on the shelf and never come back to finish it. A few stopped showing up before the end. Roughly half never got a finished cabinet out of it.
We’ve simplified that class over the years, and one of the things we took out was the dovetailed carcase. Students can still choose to cut them on the small drawer. Most don’t. More people finish now. They’re just as happy with what they built, and their friends and family are just as impressed, because nobody was grading the joinery to begin with.
The other thing worth saying is that knowing how to cut a dovetail and cutting one well are two different skills, and the second one is not a thing you buy once. Three months after my ninety days ended, a project came up that needed dovetails. I sat down confident and the first joint I cut was a mess. Gaps, out of square. The skill hadn’t held. It doesn’t hold. It’s rented, not owned, and the rent is regular contact with the work. That’s fine if you’ve decided you want it. It’s an expensive thing to sign up for by accident because you thought it was required.
None of this is an argument against learning the joint. There’s a place for it. If you’re building the piece that outlives you, the blanket chest your granddaughter gets, the thing that has to last a hundred years and look like it was meant to, cut the dovetails. That’s what they’re for. But most of what comes through my shop and yours is utility. It needs to work and it needs to be built well, and nobody is going to pull the drawer out and inspect the corners.
What I don’t want is for someone to stand at the edge of this craft, look at what’s on their screen, decide the bar is over their head, and never start. Or to start, get twisted up over a joint they didn’t need, and quit with a half-built box on a shelf. I’ve watched both happen. The second one I helped cause.
I’d rather you build a plain box, build it well, and be proud of it.
I’d still cut the ninety, though. I’d do it again tomorrow. I just wouldn’t call it the price of admission.
