Dovetailing

Nothing - well, very little - quite matches the buzz of cutting a complex joint by hand and seeing it slot together beautifully. When I trained as a joiner, I couldn’t cut a decent dovetail for love or banoffee pie - so I avoided them wherever possible.

I later learned the secrets: decent kit and lots of careful, systematic practice. The latter is a skill in itself as any successful musician will testify - get the practice technique right, and the skills build rapidly.

So that’s what I did, and after developing a little more confidence I made some bookends, but it seemed a shame to hide the joint away against a line of books so I wanted an excuse to put the joint to the front and show it off - hence the clocks, of which a significant number have been made and well received as gifts.

There are various approaches to hand-dovetailing, including cutting inside the lines with the saw and then using a sharp chisel to pare back precisely.

I prefer the ‘sawcut-to-sawcut approach - practise the sawing technique and then just go for it! There’s no room for error on this approach, but the precision comes with practice