I have never made a single dovetail joint. That may be shocking for some but I’m working on maintaining that statistic and have been successful so far. I’ve always naturally backed away from things that seem to be done just for the sake of doing them.
But I should take a second to defend the classic joint that everyone loves to see behind every drawer front. It’s very strong. There’s no doubt about it. And it looks quite nice, when it’s nicely hidden away.
Of course, I’ve seen plenty of things with visible dovetail joints, all perfectly pointy and pretty. But it’s almost always unnecessary to use a dovetail joint in a place where you can see it. Normally, a butt joint will work.

Frankly, normally a butt joint that employs glue and nails will always work but is lacklustre and doesn’t feel sophisticated. And when you show off your piece, you’re probably not going to highlight how you joined this to that by gluing and nailing.
I like to look at old furniture. I like dressers and desks and the various sideboards and pantry cabinets you can find in antique stores. It’s especially pleasing to open the drawers and see the dovetails that were hand-cut into the wood still holding the drawer front onto the sides. Quite often, the cuts are not very clean and the dovetails are not very pretty. But I think that is more a testament to the ingenuity involved in woodworking than the pristine dovetails made by a router and template. Someone had to stand there and cut those with a saw and chisel. And it’s very likely that it was done by someone fairly new to the shop. If you have a few guys working making furniture for the gentry, chances are you’ll be doling out the mind-numbing tasks to the new guy. Things don’t really change that much.

The point is, I don’t think that joint was seen as a particularly beautiful thing when Meister Dovetail invented it. I think he was looking at the drawer front and looking at the drawer side and thinking it was really annoying that you had to pull on the drawer front and that it’d be great if the joint could be made to withstand that pulling. After all, you sometimes have to pull hard on the drawer to get it open. Rubbing wax all over everything only gets you so much.
So, he thought of that nice wedge-shape that everyone knows and loves. It may have been a stroke of genius. I find it more likely that he gave it a try and thought it worked well but that it was kind of ugly and it was good it was only going to be used in a drawer, because then no one would see it.
Even now, the gentry prefer their fasteners hidden, their joints covert, their finishes immaculate. It had to have been worse then.
In the seventeenth century, normal people didn’t need dressers, let alone dovetail joints.

So I’m working on not ever making a dovetail joint. But if I absolutely have to, I will break out the handsaw and chisel. I’m sure I could do it just as neatly as some of the specimens I’ve seen.

As a partial aside, I have made box joints. I first used them while making a custom kitchen. The guy in charge of the construction insisted that I use box joints in the solid cherry sides of the drawers I was making. He claimed that people would open the drawer and immediately look for the coveted dovetail. He also claimed that very few people would be able to tell the difference between a box joint and dovetail. And I’m completely certain he was right. A box joint already looks like one side of a dovetail joint. So maybe I’ve actually made a lot of dovetail joints…

On a completely unrelated note, I’m pretty sure every handy tip has already been thought of by someone and written down somewhere. I was recently looking through an old copy of Popular Mechanics from the forties or fifties. In it was a method of using a C-clamp to drive a nail. I know I’ve either done that before or someone else mentioned it to me. And that on its own is a bit peculiar: reaching a point where you can’t say with certainty whether you’ve done something or just been told about it.