Most cabinet shops haven't cut a dovetail by hand since 1987. Tell you what — they're not wrong. There's a CNC machine that'll cut a perfect through-dovetail in eight seconds, every time, no learning curve. The drawer joints in your kitchen at home were almost certainly cut by one. It's a real craft of its own and I'm not interested in hating on it.
I still cut dovetails by hand on the drawers that get seen.
What that means
A dovetail is the joint where two pieces of wood meet at a corner with interlocking tails and pins. You see it on the front of a drawer, where the front panel meets the side. Done right, the joint can hold a drawer together for a hundred and fifty years without glue. It also looks like nothing else in carpentry. There's a reason cabinet shops put it on display drawers and hide their tongue-and-groove on the rest.
Hand-cut means: you mark the layout with a marking gauge and a sliding bevel. You cut the tails first with a dovetail saw — six teeth per inch, fine kerf. You chop the waste out with a chisel. Then you lay the tails on the pin board and trace the cut lines. Saw the pins. Chop again. Pare to the line. Test-fit. Pare again where the joint is tight. Glue.
Twenty minutes per joint, if I'm honest. A CNC will do it in eight seconds.
Why I still do it
Earl taught me to cut dovetails by hand the second week I was with him. He wasn't sentimental about it. He said: a fella who can cut a dovetail by hand can cut anything. The motions transfer. The eye for a line transfers. The patience transfers. The week we spent on dovetails was really a week of teaching me to mark, saw, and pare to a line. I've been using those three motions every day for thirty years.
A hand-cut dovetail also looks different. The pins are smaller. The spacing isn't uniform. The bottoms of the cuts have the slight irregularity of a saw kerf, not the perfectly square corner of a router bit. People who know furniture see it and know. People who don't know furniture see it and feel it without knowing why.
That's worth twelve extra minutes per drawer, on the drawers that get opened most. It isn't worth it on every drawer. I'm not Amish.
Where I don't bother
Drawers that don't get seen. Drawers in the back of a butler's pantry. Drawers in cabinets above the stove that hold spice jars. Drawers in a mudroom where the joinery is hidden by the shoes anyway.
Those get pin-routed dovetails on a Leigh jig, which is what most of the trade uses for hidden joinery. Joint's strong, uniform, nothing wrong with it. Just doesn't look like anything.
What Annie says
Annie comes out to the shop sometimes during dovetail week. She likes the sound. The chopping, mostly. She told me once it sounds like a metronome that's slightly drunk. She wasn't wrong about it.
The dog has opinions too — Riggs leaves the shop the minute the chisel work starts. Says everything about how it sounds in a small space. I've gotten used to it.
The trade-off
If I cut dovetails on every drawer, I'd build half the kitchens. The math doesn't work. So I save it for the drawers that earn it — the front-facing drawers in a kitchen, the top drawer of a chest, the visible joinery on a built-in. The rest get the Leigh jig and a clear conscience.
There's no shame in either. The shame is in pretending one is the other.