Twenty years of cutting dovetails wrong and just figured it out

I've been cutting dovetails by hand since I was 18 and always had tiny gaps I'd hide with sawdust and glue. Last week a guy at a shop in Portland watched me for two minutes and pointed out I was sawing on the wrong side of my layout line the whole time. Anyone else have a basic skill they did backwards for way too long before someone called them out?

2 comments

2 Comments

ward.mason1mo ago

Man I feel this deep in my bones... its always the little stuff that trips you up for years. Something nobody else mentioned yet is that sometimes the mistake isn't just about the saw cut but about how you're holding the workpiece itself. For a long time I was clamping my boards flat on the bench instead of standing them up vertical like you should for dovetails. That changes the whole angle your saw wants to take and makes it way harder to follow the line cleanly. Once I started holding the board upright with the tail in a vise my sawing got way more accurate without even trying to fix my cut line. Might be worth looking at your setup too because sometimes the real problem isn't your hands but how the wood is sitting in front of you.

laura_white991mo ago

Totally random but your post reminded me of trying to teach my kid to ride a bike a few years back lol. I kept focusing on his balance but it was actually the training wheels being too low that was the problem the whole time. Sometimes you just gotta look at the simple stuff first.