Of the many woodworking terms and skills that have made their way from the shop into common parlance, “dovetail” might be the most well-known. Its interlocking trapezoidal tenons, named for their similarity to the shape of a dove’s tail, create a versatile, elegant, strong joint for boxes of any size. For drawers, boxes, chests, or cabinet carcasses, it’s hard to beat the durability of a dovetail joint. A gap-free, tight-fitting hand-cut dovetail is a sign of skilled craftsmanship, and a rite of passage for an aspiring hand-tool woodworker. Unlike most other joints, a good dovetail’s function lies in its form – it holds together without glue or mechanical fasteners. The combination of strength and beauty is hard to beat.

Dovetail is also a versatile word. As a noun it can refer to an entire joint, be it a through, half-blind, or sliding variety. In the shop, it’s also a transitive verb. For example, Tom likes to dovetail his drawers using a dovetail saw and chisels, while Tim prefers to dovetail using a commercial jig and various dovetail router bits. So, it’s also an adjective, modifying saw or bit. 

Ancient Egyptian stonework and first dynasty Chinese tombs feature such joints. In the woodworking context, the term has been around at least since the mid-16th century (1555-1560; think Nostradamus, Queen Elizabeth I and an elderly Michelangelo). It jumped from the shop into figurative use soon after and has been busy ever since referring to things that fit together conceptually or in time, or otherwise share some properties. 

Recently, I searched for on-line news articles using the word “dovetail”, and found many items, including this one from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette’s Entertainment section: “Johnny Cash and American history dovetail in Dyess exhibit.” 

The Historic Dyess Colony: Johnny Cash Boyhood Home, 110 Center Drive, Dyess, is marking the nation’s 250th anniversary with a special exhibit, opening Monday, titled “Ragged Old Flag: Johnny Cash and the American Experience.” The exhibit, up through March 3, explores “American history through the lens of Johnny Cash’s music,” Will Reaves, director of the boyhood home, says in a news release, via lyrics, photographs and historical context.

Of course, the special exhibit has nothing to do with joinery, and that is exactly the point. In this column, I try to shine a light on the ideas from the shop that carry over to the rest of life. We prize dovetail joints for their strength, reliability, durability, and aesthetics. When the positive space of a tail nestles into the negative space of a tail, it is not only beautiful to look at, but there is also a sense that all is right with the world. The two complementary halves of the joint complete each other. 

When the Democrat Gazette says that Johnny Cash and American history dovetail in an exhibit, it is echoing the museum director’s intention to show the complementary nature of American history and Johnny Cash’s music. Cash’s songs were not explicitly about historical events but presumably reflect the culture and values of his time and of his American experience.

I like to think of these MTCO essays as reflecting wisdom or life lessons from shop practices. Can we say that dovetails are wise? Why not? Is there a more efficient, clever, or self-sufficient way to connect two boards at a desired angle? The assertion that two things dovetail nicely is a compliment to their complementary nature. 

Post-script: The Cash exhibit opened on August 3 and will run through March 3, 2027. The EMGW budget does not provide for travel reimbursement, but if you find yourself near Dyess, Arkansas, please check it out and report back. Though there are no woodworking stores or schools in Dyess, you might find some in Jonesboro, about 50 miles away. 

Every June, EMGW holds a social gathering featuring an all-member show-and-tell session, lots of appealing food, sparkling conversation, and election of officers for the coming year. Collectively, we refer to the officers as the Executive Board.

Hold on just a minute, there. We are woodworkers, and we know what a BOARD is. How did a piece of lumber come to refer to the policy-making group in an organization? You can thank me later, because I decided to consult Claud AI to seek an answer. The search helped to expand my vocabulary and revealed other interesting connections between woodworking and organizational life. It also underscored just how much the English language developed in a timber-centric world.

Here is part of Claude’s answer to my question “How did Board come to refer to the leaders of an organization?”:

The story traces back to a surprisingly literal origin — a piece of wood.

In Old English and early Germanic languages, bord meant a plank or flat piece of wood. This gave rise to the word being used for a table (a flat wooden surface), which is why we still say "room and board" (lodging and meals at a table) and "above board" (visible on the table, hence honest).

By the medieval period, "board" had become a common metonym for the table around which important people sat to conduct business or deliberate — the same way we still say "the head of the table." Official councils and committees literally gathered around a large wooden table, and so the board (the table) began to stand in for the people sitting at it, much the same way "the Crown" can refer to a monarch or "the bench" refers to judges.

So, we now know what a metonym is.  Other metonyms that might interest EMGW members include “the chair” (the presiding big shot who has earned the honor of sitting in a chair rather than on a more modest bench or stool) and “the Cabinet” (the group of lesser big shots who, in earlier times, met in a secluded private room).

Cabinet (probably from early French) has referred to a portable box for precious objects since the mid-1500’s. It was not long before it came to mean a chamber where private discussions might take place, and by 1604 it experienced a metonymic metamorphosis whereby The Cabinet identified the people holding those discussions.

Once you start looking, woodworking has contributed a great deal to our language. Here are a few more illustrative examples:

• What does your political party or candidate stand for? Just refer to their platform, including planks that spell out positions and aspirations on specific topics of the day.
• Why is a group of authorities called a panel? Claude explains: “Panel comes from the Old French panel and Latin panellus, a diminutive of pannus, meaning a piece of cloth or a flat section — but it quickly came to refer in medieval English to a flat piece of wood, a board or plank, particularly one inserted into a frame (as in a door panel or wall panel)….
  “In medieval English law, a panel was the piece of parchment — or later a flat writing surface — on which the sheriff wrote down the names of prospective jurors summoned for a case….
  “So the chain runs: flat piece of wood → flat writing surface → document listing names → the people on the list → any assembled group of experts.”
• Repeated practice or training is sometimes called a Drill.
• Finally, though most of us begin a project with planks and boards, the material from the lumber yard or home center is sawn or split from a log, a word with many uses.  Again, I’ll lazily turn to Claude for the explanation:
  “in the age of sail, navigators needed to measure a ship's speed through the water, and they did it with a remarkably simple device — a flat piece of wood, roughly wedge or pie-shaped, tied to a long rope that had knots tied in it at regular intervals. The wooden float was thrown overboard off the stern, where it would sit relatively stationary in the water while the ship moved away from it. A sailor would count how many knots passed through his hands in a fixed amount of time (measured by a sandglass), and that count gave the ship's speed — which is precisely why we still measure nautical speed in knots today.

“That wooden float was called a log — simply because it was a chunk of wood, in the same way any piece of timber might be called a log. The measurements taken with the log were recorded at regular intervals in a book, which naturally became the logbook, later shortened to simply log.

“From seafaring the term spread to any systematic record of activity over time — a captain's log, a flight log, a log of phone calls — and then into computing, where we log in, generate logs, and record error logs, probably without ever picturing that little wooden float drifting in the wake of a sailing ship.”

With that, I am logging off for the summer. The next MTCO will appear in September.

During a recent Shop Night Live, Tom McLaughlin quoted Jere Osgood (1936-2023) as saying “A straight line is a missed opportunity" to create visual interest in a design. True though that may be, straight, flat surfaces are a woodworker’s friends when it comes to joinery. When you move from design to creation, cut the joinery before making the curves. Even if the curves are the dominant feature, the joints come first.

To cite a simple example, consider a table with turned legs. It might be tempting to shape the leg first and then figure out how to support it while drilling or chopping mortises, but one would soon discover that it’s easier, more accurate, and safer to work out the joinery when the work piece can be secured flat to the bench, drill press, mortising machine etc. This applies all the more so to cabriole and other curvy styles. One big challenge in chair-making is that it’s often necessary to use a specialized jig to hold a turned part so that you can drill a round mortise (aka a hole) to receive a stretcher.

Thinking through the order of operations is imperative in the shop. For some operations, you probably already have well-established routines, as when preparing stock or sanding parts beginning with coarse grits and progressing through finer grits. Similar logic holds for applying finishes. If you perform a task often enough, you don’t want to be figuring out the order of operations each time. It’s far better to have a tried-and-true sequence of steps so that you don’t paint yourself into a corner, so to speak.

At some point in learning secondary-school algebra, we learned about “order of operations”. Remember learning how to tackle an expression like 6 + 2 x (5 – 2)²? Close your eyes and you might hear your middle school math teacher’s voice instructing you. You had to overcome years of training about proceeding left to right and learn a new set of priorities.

Airline crews and astronauts have detailed pre-flight checklists, athletes have pre-game warm-ups, orchestras have a well-established sequence to tune up before a concert. Surgical teams follow a Universal Protocol, including a Time Out, before every operation. The participants don’t invent or improvise the drills in the moment. There may be leeway to deviate or modify the steps well before “game time”, but never immediately before the main event.

Fun fact (I believe; please correct me if I’m wrong). Traditionally, tuning begins with an oboe playing a concert A (440 Hertz); according to the Rockford Symphony Orchestra website, “the bright, rather penetrating sound of the oboe was easy to hear, and its pitch was more stable than gut strings.” Other stable instruments like woodwinds and brass come next, followed by lower then upper strings, whose tuning is least stable. A cellist friend once explained to me that his cello could drift out of tune on the short walk from a backstage green room to his assigned seat on-stage.

In all of the above examples, the starting point is chosen for reasons of logic, technical requirement of the equipment and environment, safety, etc. Generally speaking, there’s too much at stake to simply dive in without forethought. Careful preparation may not have been invented in a woodshop, but the habits of mind that we develop as woodworkers turn up in many domains. First things first!

Measure Twice, Cut Once June 2025

Rob Carver

Personally, I find little joy in adjusting, cleaning, aligning, oiling, waxing, and otherwise caring for my machines and hand tools. I’ve gradually come to enjoy and feel confident about sharpening edge tools, though hand saws are a different story. And the larger power equipment like the table saw, lathe, bandsaw, jointer, planer, etc. require different skills and time expenditure. Still, being lucky enough to have a shop in a separate outbuilding with little in the way of climate and humidity control, I’ve accepted the mission of keeping up with fundamental machine maintenance. It’s a lot less work to keep up with and avoid light surface rust than it is to restore a rusty or corroded tool. This is one case where an ounce of prevention truly is worth a pound of care.

I suspect that we all have different philosophies and approaches on this matter. Based on numerous FIG meeting shop tours, some differences stand out. Of course, we get a skewed impression inasmuch as a relatively small number of members are able and willing to host a FIG meeting. Often, the host comments that it took a long time to clean the shop to get it presentable, but some level of regular attention is necessary to keep doing accurate, safe work.

Depending on the non-woodworking activities we pursue, there are obvious analogies in our lives. Especially for those of us in the so-called Golden Years, the maintenance of our bodies becomes a pressing priority. Common sense calls for attention to the health of our bones, muscles, brains, and guts whether or not we’ve previously been in the habit. Household appliances, lawn mowers, and cars demand similar attention, as do plumbing fixtures and roofs.

On the job, as I’ve noted in prior essays, it’s essential to keep up with developments in our chosen fields. Best practices evolve and new technologies appear. It’s so easy to fall behind without constant vigilance, and that is a form of maintenance and periodic overhaul or reconditioning. Taking an on-line certification or attending a workshop might be a form of maintaining our skill/tool set.

For navigating the sometimes-bumpy road of life, I’ve also found value in working to maintain one’s sense of balance, humor, compassion, and equanimity. People who study such things say that we can develop our resilience and ability to adapt – I’d call that a valuable way to maintain some very important tools.

And, as in the shop, it’s so much simpler and more efficient to do such maintenance work when things are in relatively good working order than to wait and build back after too much degradation. As summer approaches and the humidity rises, take some time to look after the iron in your shop and the metaphorical rust elsewhere.

This will be my final essay for the current year. I’ll take July and August off, and look forward to a next installment in September. As always, I’m open to suggestions. What wisdom have you acquired in the shop? Please let me know.