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A Craftsman's Theory on Why Handmade Dovetails Are So Sloppy on Antique Furniture

This contradicts the prevailing theory that "people just didn't care"

By Rain Noe - November 27, 2017

in Tools & Craft

I am no master craftsman; I consider myself barely competent, and yet I learned to cut dovetails like these after taking several sessions of a class.

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So something that's been puzzling me is why, on antique furniture, are dovetails that were made by master craftsmen often so sloppy?

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I've heard the theory that joiners/cabinetmakers were simply in a rush and didn't care how they looked, but something about that always nagged at me. Here Richard Maguire, a/k/a The English Woodworker, provides an alternate theory that I find compelling:

Richard Rants - Scruffy Dovetails from The English Woodworker on Vimeo.

It makes perfect sense to me. The craftsmen of centuries past did not have access to finely-made tools like the kick-ass dovetailing saw I use; the manufacturing of the time simply wasn't as dialed in as we've got it now.

I posted this video to a woodworking group on Facebook--and while some agreed with it, I also got instant push-back. "There is no documented or physical evidence to support this theory," one commenter wrote. But isn't the Industrial Revolution, and the constant improvement in tool-building over what people were stuck with before, the evidence itself?

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Nathan D.

6 years ago

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I see three major problems with this:

1) Better joinery was produced centuries before the industrial revolution. The English were responsible for very little of it, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen with even more primitive tools.

2) Every paid "article" published by every boutique hand tool school/shop owner on this site has repeatedly insisted that there have been absolutely no meaningful improvements to any of these tools, ever, and anyone who goes out and buys some highfalutin computer designed adjustable mouth plane or needs a different saw tooth geometry to cut a straight line is just lazy and wasting their money. Granted, they have done no meaningful research of any kind on these subjects and reflexively dismiss anything they don't need to make their dreary little boxes with as "jungle wood," but that's the anglocentric party line they're toeing to draw the handlebar mustached "Kinfolk" crowd in to their shops (which would probably very happily sell everything Lie Nielsen makes if they were allowed to). Citing these authors while asserting that the opposite of everything they've ever said is true does not bolster the authority of any given editorial voice.

3) Not all antique furniture was made by "master craftsmen" and it certainly wasn't all owned by them forever. Windows didn't seal, buildings were heated with steam--drawers warped, got stuck, and then rebuilt by whoever was around. Find somebody with a few dozen of the exact same piece from the exact same production facility exhibiting the exact same slop and then you've got a very real trend worth investigating and conversing about in a potentially fascinating bit of writing. Without that, it's just mindless conjecture.

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Donald Jones

6 years ago

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If only we lived at a Standard temperature and pressure and humidity our whole lives through, then I guess once something was built it would never change. Try to build something to last for millennia. If you can build a monument out of light or water, then I guess it will last forever.

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