Dovetail process

[Ron Swanson Jr.]

After 1 innocent mistake, one boneheaded mistake, and one unfortunate situation involving my wife's kitty cat, the drawer from the little table I'm working on...i decided rebuilding would be the easiest path. 

So i started on that this morning, and took some pictures through the process. Not that I'm am expert or anything but here's some detail on my process. 

GETTING STARTED

First things first, i try to make myself comfortable in the shop by bringing a thermos of coffee and putting on some early Pink Floyd albums or something else soothing to listen to. 

 start with square, flat pieces and mark them. I use triangles. I can't overstate the importance of this. 

TAIL BOARD

I scribe the shoulder line on all 4 faces and chisel a knife wall, then use a skew block plane to cut a very small rabbet on the inside face. It's only about 1/32" deep. 

 

Then lay out the tails across the end grain using dividers. I just take the width in inches, drop the fraction, and that's how many tails i cut. So if it's 3- 1/8" wide, 3 tails. 4-3/16", 4 tails. Etc. 

And then saw each tail slope going left to right, and then saw each one going right to left being careful not to go past the shoulder line. 

 

 

For the shoulders, cut a little knife wall to the scribe line and rest your saw blade against it and cut straight down. Clean up the corner and be careful not to saw into the tail. 

Clean out that fluff in the corner with a sharp chisel. 

 

TRANSFERRING 

I showed this before but I'm a firm believer in a jig to accurately transfer the tails onto the pin board. I use a knife and then go over the knife line with a fine mechanical pencil. 

 

PIN BOARD

with the tails scribed, extend the lines down the face to the shoulder line. These don't have to be perfect, it's more of a reference for my eye to cut straight. 

It's a little tricky to saw out the pin board without going past the shoulder or the lap line. The one thing I've learned is to stop and blow the dust away so you can see each line and stop a little bit before you reach either boundary. 

Removing the waste on the pin board is pretty straightforward. Chop down the shoulder line, VERY lightly at first, and then chop in from the end grain. This takes out nice, uniform chunks and gives me the most control. There's other ways to go about this but this is the best way I've found. 

 

With the bulk of the waste removed, you can see pretty easily where the saw cut and where it did not. 

Use that smooth sawn part as a reference surface and pare out the rough stuff. 

And then i use this new fish tail to clean out the corners and any little bits i missed.

 

If all goes well it'll look something like this. 

 

And the moment of truth. 

 

And that's it. There's a million videos out there that explain it better than i can. But 2 things that are really help full are a moxon vice to hold work higher than bench level and good task lighting. 

Hopefully this is mildly helpful if anyone is struggling with this joint. 

 

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Sorry i don't know why the pictures below are duplicates but i can't seem to delete them. 

 

 

 

[Von]

Thanks for documenting this. I appreciate the process being drilled into my brain one more time. One step you do is new to me:

Quote

...then use a skew block plane to cut a very small rabbet on the inside face. It's only about 1/32" deep.

Can you elaborate on why you do this? TIA.

[Ron Swanson Jr.]

On 9/13/2025 at 4:24 PM, Von said:

 

Can you elaborate on why you do this? TIA.

Sure thing. When you go to transfer the tails onto the pin board, the "lip" of the rabbet registers against the pin board, which makes for a more secure connection between the two boards, and makes them less likely to move on you. If you cut a little deeper rabbet than i did, it will also make the inside of the joint look nice and neat. 

You can do this with both through and half blind, but i usually only do it on half blinds - mainly because you REALLY don't want that tail board to slip forward when you're transferring the tails. 

 

You can also get a similar result using masking tape instead of cutting a rabbet 

[Coop]

Sweet!