Warning:  this post will only make sense to those who have, for one reason or another, attempted to cut dovetails by hand!

It might not be much to look at, but I have finally achieved something that has long alluded me.  The perfect hand-cut dovetail.  I have cut dovetails by hand before but they were awful; imperfect fit with gaps and crooked saw lines.  It was an exercise in pure frustration.  I have mastered machine-cut dovetails which really is not much of an accomplishment.  Buy a jig, follow the set-up instructions, and carefully execute the cuts.  Don’t get me wrong – those are *perfect* fitting joints that do look beautiful when assembled.  But they look like….they came from a computerized machine.  Certainly if I need to make replicate pieces I will not hesitate to use my dovetail jig and make the cuts by machine.  But I have established a goal for my woodworking that I want to make one-of-a-kind pieces that exude craftsmanship.  And to do that I need to master the hand-cut dovetail.  

I have worked for the past 2 weeks, on and off, trying to cut these.  And the results were similar to previous attempts.  I started to wonder if the world really is separated into those who can and those who can’t cut dovetails.  Interestingly, these failures were also killing my motivation for woodworking in general.  I have watched hours of YouTube videos and read many books and magazine articles.  Everyone has their own opinions and techniques and recommendations – it seems like woodworkers are more dogmatic in general than others….  Through all of this I discovered hand-cut dovetail jigs.  These are handheld devices that are manufactured with the correct pins and tails angles and contain little built-in magnets to hold a saw to the cut line.  So I invested the money and tried them.  The lesson learned is one that I keep re-learning throughout my life:  there really are no shortcuts and if you want to do something, just keep practicing until you get it right.  These jigs are ingenious devices and I can see how they can accelerate the learning curve, but they were just not for me.  I found myself becoming lazy and my saw cuts were really no better than without the jig, just sawing to a line.  

Back to the basics.  I simply practiced, over and over, hand sawing to a straight line, then to angled lines.  When I finally was semi-comfortable with that, I practiced chisel paring, again over and over, until I was semi comfortable paring to a line.  After all of this practice I tried my first dovetail, the result of which is shown in the picture above — my first one after the practice sessions was perfect!  But before I got to this point there were probably 100 or so imperfect dovetails.  (Imperfect being a polite way of describing awful!)

Anyway, I wanted to document this event more for myself than anyone else.  I am stopping for the day with this victory but will continue practicing these single hand-cut dovetails until I feel more confident that my first was not a fluke and than move on to some sort of dovetailed box.  I will certainly add a picture if when that’s achieved!

Update:

More practice, practice, practice…