Ben Johnson put together a nice slideshow on how to make a dovetail joint. Dovetails are an old-school way of mechanically connecting wood boards at right angles, and you’ll most often seem them used in modern drawer construction. Dovetail joints are strong, yet elegant, and infinite design permutations allow you to add a personalized look to your projects.
The most common excuse for not giving dovetail joinery a try sounds something like: oh, I don’t have the right tools. As Ben demonstrates, you don’t need expensive or specialty tools to make a good-looking dovetail joint. Experience does help you make better looking joints, but that just comes with practice.
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Here are the tools Ben used in the demo: bevel gauge (although you can alternatively make a marker out of scrap wood), wood chisel, utility knife, combination square (or similar), dovetail saw (a backsaw works well too), pencil, clamp, and a coping saw.
Get Woodworking! You Can Make Dovetails via Ben’s Workshop
Photo: Emhoo via Wikipedia
jeff_williams
I’m a regular reader of Ben’s and I didn’t think of this question until I saw Stuart’s image at the top. How do you decide which way the dovetails go? Which piece gets the pins and which gets the tails?
Stuart
That depends on the type of project, but you want to orient your joints such, that in the presence of any load or stress, the tails pull tighter into the pins.
In the photo above, the board on the left has the tails, and the board on the right with the hole in it has the pins.
If you look closely at the joint, you’ll see that pulling the tails board leftward in a parallel direction, or the pins board to the right in a perpendicular direction will tighten the joint.
Pulling the tails board in a perpendicular direction and the pins board in a parallel direction may loosen the joint. Even with the joint glued up, this type of motion is not ideal.
For something like a workbench, the joints will likely be reinforced Dovetail orientation is more critical when designing and building drawers. If you build a drawer front with tails instead of pins and don’t glue it up, you might pull the drawer face right off if you open the drawer too quickly or forcefully.