Today I cut the tail boards for a woodworking project. These are the first dovetails I’ve cut at my house since I moved in 2016. I have made dovetails before, but somehow the project always went awry and I had to abandon it. I have a good feeling about this one, though.
Dovetails are a classic woodworking joint for making two boards come together (usually) at right angles. The basics of dovetails are that you have one board that has a line of angled trapezoids that look like a row of mourning doves sticking their tail feathers up in the air. This is called the tailboard. A second board, called the pinboard, comes in at a right angle with a series of pins that fit the holes between the tails of the birds… and the two joints lock together. In carcase work — that is, when you’re building boxes that will become bookshelves or dressers or cabinets with an opening that faces forward — the top and bottom of the carcase are the pinboards, and the sidewalls are the tailboards. This holds the top and bottom boards in place, locked between the tails of the tailboards. Nails (usually a specialty type of nail called cut nails) driven into the shelves, which are themselves set in a groove called a dado, help hold the carcase together.
I wound up cutting five dovetails on each board (including the half-pin on either end of each board , which I forgot to photograph). They’re not terrible for a relative beginner who’s much out of practice, and as my friend J says, “They’re probably the worst dovetails you’ll ever cut. They can only get better from here.”
He’s probably right.
Why Cut Dovetails?
This is part of a project based on the Dutch Tool Chest provided in Megan Fitzpatrick’s book from Lost Art Press, a book titled, appropriately enough Dutch Tool Chests. I have a small and not-well-made six-board chest at the moment, which holds all my hand tools for woodworking, and has become uncomfortably full of various components and tools. I also have a Japanese tool box in the shed which is rapidly disassembling itself (like the shed, too!), which has a number of parts and tools in it that are slowly rusting and otherwise deteriorating. My tool collection needs more space.
I’ve thought long and hard about tool chests, thanks to Christopher Schwarz’s incomparable book, The Anarchist’s Tool Chest. Far from being a guide to bomb-making or overthrowing capitalism, it’s a guide to the tools and techniques of hand-tool woodworkers in Europe from the 1600s through 1800s. I reviewed the companion volume, The Anarchist’s Design Book, back in 2016 in the midst of some hoopla about a Gordon White book in the occult blogosphere of the time. A short while later, my life exploded to my profound regret, and I lost my woodworking space and opportunities for quite some time, until Schwarz came out with Ingenious Mechanicks, which Rex Kreuger simplified for me a bit, and I built my own Roman-style low or seated woodworking bench.
I think I started it the year before the pandemic in 2019, and then finished it in the summer of 2020. Then we moved again, in early 2021, and I was suddenly stuck.
And then I left off of woodworking for a while until I made this saw bench and saw-bent last year, and made a till for my first (badly made) six-board chest. From those projects, I learned a few things about cutting bridle joints and making mortises and tenons… and realized that I now had too many tools to fit in that six-board chest.
So this is a guide to my previous woodworking projects, and how I’ve been growing my hobbyist set-up, and learning the skills needed to be a woodworker. It’s unclear if this is going to be as workable as I wanted, now that we’re unclear how and where US timber resources are coming from, or how much they’re going to cost… but I hope you’ll follow along with this journey as I work out the next step in the development of my woodworking set-up.
