Showerthought: Hand-cut dovetails vs router jigs - the router wins every time for production work

Spent 2 years doing everything by hand until a buddy with a Leigh jig showed me his output last Tuesday, and I just can't justify the extra 4 hours per drawer for something customers never notice. Am I missing something or has anyone else made the swap?

2 comments

2 Comments

eric35924d ago

My buddy Mike spent 3 months learning hand-cut dovetails for a kitchen remodel he was doing for his sister. Built all 12 drawers by hand, proud as could be. Three weeks after install she called him saying two of the drawer fronts were pulling loose. Turned out his pins were too thin and snapped under the weight of her cast iron pots. He rebuilt those four drawers with a router jig in one afternoon and they're still solid 5 years later. He still does hand-cut stuff for his own projects but never for paying customers anymore.

tara34524d ago

So he spent all that time getting good at cutting dovetails by hand, but apparently never learned how to size them properly for the job? That's the part that gets me. Three months of practice and he's still making pins that snap under kitchen drawer weight? I get that hand-cut dovetails look beautiful, but if you can't figure out the basic engineering of how thick the pins need to be for a drawer full of cast iron, what's the point? Did he ever figure out what the right pin size should have been for that kind of load, or did he just switch to the router jig and never look back?