Sliding dovetail joints are peculiar—sometimes, the two parts are meant to travel past one another; other times, they’re glued together. Whatever their purpose, making these joints is [...]
Yes, you’re right, Frank Klausz cutting dovetails isn’t exactly new. In fact, I’ve been watching Frank cut dovetails for 25 years. But guess what, it never gets old! This master [...]
There are numerous jigs for cutting dovetails with a router. My go-to is the Keller pro series model 1601. It’s simple to use, though unlike jigs that cut pins and tails in one fell swoop, [...]
I recently posted on our Instagram account and Twitter feed the opening image from Rob Cosman’s 2006 article “Houndstooth Dovetails,” and it proved remarkably popular – so I figured I [...]
I’m pressing pause on my saw restoration for a bit because I realized that once it’s refurbished, I will have no place to put it. I have a few hand tools that I’ve accumulated over [...]
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: [...]