Finely Strung

Another useful aid to cutting dovetails is a dovetail marker. Several different designs are available to buy but I like this shop-made one best. Once again, it comes from Robert Wearing’s book, The Resourceful Woodworker (ISBN 0 7134 8006 8), and is fairly easily made from a sheet of brass 1 to 2 mm thick. Its advantage over the type that Lie-Nielsen and Veritas make is that you only have to set out the centre position of the pins on the edge of the board. The triangular ‘window’ of the marker then lets you see exactly where you’re marking out the joint. It works equally well whether you prefer to cut the pins or the tails first – an argument that I don’t intend to get into.

I suppose purists who like to use a steeper slope for dovetails in softwood would need two markers, one at a 1 in 6 slope and one at 1 in 8. I confess that I never bother about this, cutting all dovetails at 1 in 8, regardless of what sort of wood I’m working with.