I took up woodworking in my 40s. I had extravagant visions of the useful and beautiful pieces I was going to make. A whole world was opening before me, and boy, was it exciting. Also expensive. I was especially taken with the simplicity and practicality of Shaker furniture. Simple meant easy, right? Wrong. In order to make anything that resembled even the most basic Shaker pieces, I had to master an advanced skill. I had to learn to cut a dovetail joint.
Next time you’re near a piece of wooden furniture, slide out a drawer a little and see how the front and side are attached to each other. There’s a good chance you’ll find a dovetail. It’s a very effective way of joining two pieces of wood. If the joint is well-cut, you don't even need glue. The tenon is cut in the shape of a bird’s tail that spreads towards its end. The mortise is a notch cut precisely to receive the tenon. A well-cut dovetail joint is as beautiful as it ingenious.
A dovetail joint: the tenon, above, is cut precisely to fit in the mortise, below. The pieces will be firmly wed for a very long time.
Cutting a dovetail joint is a true test of craftsmanship. In his book The Nature and Art of Workmanship, David Pye defines craftsmanship as work whose quality depends on the judgement, dexterity and care of the maker. The outcome, he argues, is continually at risk during the process of making: one slip might ruin the piece. Bringing risk into the discussion makes a lot of sense, because there’s no way to uncut a dovetail. If your saw wanders off a straight line, or cuts a mortise that's too wide, there's no faking your way back.
Which brings us to the tool called a dovetail saw (pictured at the top). Because so much depends on cutting the joint flawlessly, you wouldn’t dream of entrusting the task to a cheap piece of steel. As an aside, I confess that one of woodworking’s most seductive charms is the fact that you can buy a tool or a jig or a template or a gadget for absolutely any and every purpose. The corollary of course is that the more you spend on your gizmo, the closer you get to a sure-fire guarantee of success, right? My dovetail saw was French-made. It had a shapely pistol grip handle. A key selling point was that the steel blade had 32 tiny teeth cut into every inch of its overall length. With all those teeth, the sales pitch went, this shark of a saw would chomp through even the orneriest pierce of cabinet grade wood.
I brought my saw home and went on a dovetail binge. I cut mortises and tenons wherever it made sense (or not). I made drawers and I made boxes and then I made more of each. Poorly. I had already made a Shaker step stool using an indifferent saw because I didn’t actually expect to finish the project. Now that I had a $60 excalibur from a top woodworking store in New York, Garrett Wade (so upstream it was on the second floor), there was no limit to my potential.
One day a piece of mail arrived from Garrett Wade announcing a lecture series. One of the topics: how to cut a better dovetail. Exactly the help I needed! The speaker was Mario Rodriguez, a woodworking instructor and writer well-known to readers of Fine Woodworking magazine, like me. So one night after work, I went over to Garrett Wade, which was then in Soho. I climbed up the stairs. Even before I reached the landing I was intoxicated by the heady scent of sawdust, shellac, varnish and metal. I sat down in one of the dozen or so folding chairs that had been set up for the lecture. At the front of the room was a workbench.
Rodriguez took the stage, looking friendly and relaxed. He wore corduroy slacks and a turtleneck shirt.
"If you want to cut better dovetails," he said, "you need a better saw." (I am paraphrasing a bit -- this was a few decades ago.)
Damn, I thought. I just bought a better saw.
“Think about it,” he said. “More teeth means more resistance and that means more work and that means less accuracy. Why do you want to make it so hard?" What followed was a breathtaking demonstration, akin to the magician who puts his lovely assistant in a box and saws her in half. To wit, he secured a fancy dovetail saw upside down in a vise on the workbench and quickly filed off all the teeth. This was counterintuitive, to put it mildly — a little like saying “If you want to upgrade your Corvette, start by smashing in the windshield.” Then, using triangular files of different sizes, he cut new teeth, about 12 to the inch. That didn't take long either. Now he sets the angle of the teeth, bending each one ever so slightly this way and that like alternating dog ears. Finally, he invites us to come up and try the saw on a piece of wood with a straight line drawn down its front. No question: it was easier to push through the wood. It cut dead straight, very fine very easy.
I was glad not to have to buy another saw. All I had to do now was run the risk of ruining the one I already had. For that, I did have to buy some triangular Japanese files, of course, along with a bunch of other essential items that I never knew I needed until that very evening.
I am not and will not ever be an artisan. But the lesson was priceless — and liberating -- nevertheless. “It’s simple,” Rodriguez said as he sent us off into the night. “If the tool you’ve got can’t do the job, change the tool so that it can.”
Post-script: After all this, it turned out that my first Shaker step stool, the one I made in the basement with an ordinary saw from Ace Hardware, is still the most useful piece I ever made.
'Tis a poor craftsman who blames his tools, and a clever one who makes them better.