• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Pathetic attempt - first dovetail joint ever done.

Yeah, but you learned lots. The next one will be better because of the imperfections in this one. I'd urge you to knife (rather than score) your cross-grain marks, and to apply Mike's Rule of Halves when chiselling back to the knife-line. Like all joints, the key to success is in the marking, not really in the woodwork.

Oh, and make it easier for yourself by using boards of equal dimensions.
 
In terms of fit, you should feel quite happy with that. May I suggest next time that you adjust the proportions of the tails and perhaps make three rather than two.
 
Thanks, wasn't even concerned re proportions just wanted to give it a go but yes good advice.
I will keep this one just for comparison to hopefully better joints in the future.
 
I've seen far worse first attempts at it! try using dividers if you have any for the proportions, I'd also recommend drawing it out full-scale first, 90% of it is in the prep work
 
Had you got it perfect first time what would you have learnt?😀
I made a 7 drawer tool storage cabinet in birch ply with DT’s front and back for my first DTs. The worse fitting ones are all at the back . The beauty of the DT joint is even poorly fitted ones can still be very strong.
 
I echo everyone else’s comments, a very decent first attempt, all of us have been there.

It’s actually not far off the same quality as you would find in mass produced hand-cut drawers, so long as the joints would hold together it was completely fine!
 
You only think it's pathetic Duke because you're comparing with experienced people who have cut hundreds or thousands and practice makes better. Be self critical, yes or you wouldn't improve but definitely don't be hard on yourself, that's a decent effort. (y)
 
To be honest I have a gizmo for different angles and didn't scribe any lines, just a pencil mark. Next time I will attempt a more serious attitude. Thanks for the link.
I wasn't thinking about proportions etc., just wanted to see if I was capable of doing a dovetail joint.
I was cleaning out the garage to be able to change out SWMBO tires on her car and thought I'd give it a go.
 
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Yes a very good first attempt duke, don’t know why but I prefer doing lap dt’s, probably because you can’t see the back shoulder line lol.
Winter to summer tyres? It was quite a revelation to me the first time I tried winter ones. I’m thinking you must have them on another set of rims? Quite a faff otherwise.
 
Duke, if my experience is anything to go by, the most frustrating is yet to come. It involves cutting loads of dovetails that you're not quite happy with - frustrating because you put so much effort in and were so careful. Then one day you will pick up a couple of offcuts and decide to fill two minutes with a bit of casual practice and behold!: the dovetails will be perfect. I reckon that a lot of learning involves serious practice to get the skills and then learning how to relax a bit so that the skills can show themselves. FWIW my dovetails are still not guaranteed perfect every time but I'm the only one who knows where the bodies are buried.
 
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