AW Extra 4/26/12 - 4 Tips for Dovetailing by Hand

When dovetailing by hand, be bold. Don’t bother with a try square or sliding bevel. After gauging a thickness line across the board, lay out the pins with your saw as you make each cut. Trust your eye to find a pleasing dovetail angle and repeat it over and over. Trust your hands with a sharp saw to cut straight down. If you’ve never done this before, let go of your anxiety and just do it. Practice, practice, practice. You’ll be amazed at how easy it becomes.

Don’t worry about the exact sizes of the pins or the spaces between them. In fact, a little variation is a good thing. Your right and left hands aren’t perfectly symmetrical, so it’s okay if your dovetails aren’t, either.

Click any image to view a larger version.

To start, plant the chisel slightly ahead of the gauge line and give it a whack with a round-headed mallet. The slope of the chisel’s bevel moves the cut right to the line. Experience tells you how far away from the line to set the chisel. March across the board, repeating the same cut.

Next comes a sloped cut that defines the shoulder. It’s made with the chisel facing the same direction as the initial cut—an economy of movement that’s common to all good handwork. This cut carries the chisel pretty deep, almost up to the first cut.

A combination of vertical cuts and sloped cuts remove most of the waste. Slightly tilt the vertical cuts. This “undercutting” saves a lot of time in cleaning up the dovetails.

Leave a flat spot at the end of the waste.—if you’ve ever torn out the interior of a hand-chopped dovetail, you’ll appreciate this tip. Chop halfway down one side of the board, brush away the chips and turn the board over. The flat spot supports the waste so there’s no tear out.

Don't worry about making a few mistakes—just learn to fix them. Here a mistake in cutting left an open joint. So while the glue was still wet, a wedge was sawed and lightly tapped into the gap. Now that the glue has dried, the end of the wedge can be cut off.

Use a plane to clean up, working from the corners to the middle. When finely set and super sharp, a hand plane slices through the end grain, leaving a smooth, flat surface that you can’t get with sandpaper. Remove any ridges the plane may leave with a cabinet scraper.

This story originally appeared in American Woodworker 171 Tips and Techniques.

171 Tips and Techniques

Purchase this back issue.