Hand-Cutting Dovetails

Basic steps for beautiful joints.

- Logan Wittmer

Dovetails. They get put on a pedestal as a sign of quality. And while not every project or furniture style warrants them, I enjoy sitting down, listening to an audiobook, and cutting them by hand. Once you break down dovetails into a series of basic steps, I think you’ll find that hand-cutting them is easier than you think. Here’s my process for hand-cutting through dovetails.

Essential Layout First

Before any thought is given to picking up a saw, you’ll want to prep your stock. The front and back parts need to be the same length, as do the sides. Unless you want a twisted case, you’ll also want to make sure that the ends are square. The shooting board takes care of squaring everything up and allows me to sneak parts to final length. Now you can begin some layout. I start by using a marking gauge. Photo 1 below shows the style I like. It’s a small gauge that has a razor blade for the marking edge. It leaves a good, crisp line. I’ll set the gauge so it’s slightly larger than the thickness of my workpiece — about a thirty-second or so.

The next step is to mark all of the parts. This means dragging the marking gauge around all of the faces and edges on each end of the workpieces. You want this line, called the baseline, to be easily visible. Make a hard mark in one pass, as double lines will cause some problems down the road.