Reply To: Tear out when chopping dovetails
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@dclare The tear out along your knifewalls makes me wonder if your knife is sharp enough and if your knife wall is deep enough. The first chops should be very gentle. Not much comes out at the beginning (1st pass, maybe two) when you deepen the knife wall.
Remember that the strength of a dovetail comes from the long grain, not the end grain. So, while the tear out may frustrate you, the joint is likely 100% strong. So, go ahead and build your drawers and learn as you go. I think that as long as a dovetail looks good, the long grain surfaces will be tight enough for a good glue joint. In fact, I suspect that even if a dovetail is a little imperfect, you’ll still have a strong joint. It’s funny….we stress over dovetail appearance but one of the wonderful things about dovetails is that they are almost always strong no matter how messed up they may look. That’s not true of other joints, like M&T’s, which can look beautiful, hidden behind their shoulders, but which might be quite weak if sloppy. In some ways, dovetails are the ideal “quick and dirty” joint. It makes me suspect that the old timers used them because they worked, not because they looked good, while we fuss over how they look and forget about how they work. Upside down backwards….