Hit my 500th dovetail joint today, here's what surprised me about it

Been doing cabinets for about 7 years now, mostly production work but some custom stuff on the side. I keep a tally in my shop notebook for no real reason, just a habit. Today I finished my 500th dovetail and honestly the number that blew me away was not the 500, it was that I only scrapped 12 in the whole run. When I started I was lucky if I got one good one out of every three. Felt like my hands just figured it out around the 200 mark, the chisels stopped fighting me and the angles got consistent. Not sure I have a tip beyond just not giving up on the ugly ones early. Anyone else keep count of a specific task or operation that took way longer to click than you expected?

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rivera.jesse26d ago

That 200 mark thing really tracks with my experience, not on dovetails but on getting my table saw cuts to stop drifting. I'd bet the real breakthrough is when your brain stops overthinking every little step and just lets the muscle memory take over. For me it was around the point where I stopped watching the blade and started watching the workpiece, which sounds backwards but it's when things finally clicked. The scrap rate dropping that hard is probably the best sign you're actually learning though, not just getting lucky. I kept a tally of box joints for a while and it was like 1 in 4 at first, then suddenly it was just boring and consistent.