Dovetails
Saturday 21st October 2023
Hello friends,
When I tell people I make furniture, the usual response is something along the lines of, "Oh, like...using dovetails?"
Dovetails were once the method de-facto to join two pieces of wood at right angles, and indeed there are examples of their use stretching back as far as Ancient Egypt. I love looking at antique furniture to see the craftsmanship of 100 years ago. Open any drawer in a well-made pre-war piece, and you’ll usually see a wonderful set of half-lap dovetails, complete with faint scribe-line, used by the cabinetmaker to mark them out.
You don’t see them much now. Occasionally in well-made bespoke fitted furniture some machine-cut dovetails may be present in the drawers - and this is a nice detail, but by-and-large, modern joining methods have removed the dovetail from our everyday furniture.
This is not without reason.
The labour and skill required to produce dovetails far outweighs the benefit they offers over modern methods in terms of functionality.
But hand-cut dovetails add something different to a piece, more than just mere functionality.
The dovetail now occupies a sort of hall-mark position of good makers, and great furniture. In the little corner they occupy on a piece of furniture they show us a functional join, the involvement of a craftsman, and a unique aesthetic. A perfect meeting-point, if you will, between craftsman, design and function.
Key to good dovetail work is good saw work. Most of us have used saws plenty of times for rough-cuts, but the dovetail saw should be seen as a precision tool. The kerf (saw cut) must follow the line exactly. Draw a pencil line to cut the tails and ‘split it’ with the saw. Knife a line to precision-mark the pins and cut to it exactly - just touching the line, on the waste side.
Leave too much waste and you’ll have to shave off the excess with a chisel. Stray into the ‘good wood’ and - uh oh - start again!
And learning this takes time. Woodwork Author and Publisher Chris Schwartz reckons that every woodworker has 150 bad sets of dovetails in their hands, and that a serious hand-tool woodworker needs to get rid of them as quickly as possible.
I don’t know if I took 150 goes before I could start to cut them properly, but I certainly remember needing a lot of practice during my training before making my ‘apprentice piece’ - a pair of 1” thick Oak bookends (I don’t recall exacly how many - I think I lost count at 15!)
And that is the silent addition that a set of dovetails adds to a piece:
The trials and error of the woodworker.
The almost-there-ness of a dozen practice pieces that find their way to the workshop’s fire stove come the winter.
The human effort and care that graces those little corners of the work, adding to the story of the piece.
Once again, it is a sub-communication from the piece, saying without words, that ‘a human has made this’
Until next time, stay sharp friends,
~sh