Dovetails on antique furniture: handmade or factory-made?

A hand-cut dovetail joint has few, broad tails and narrow pins, uneven spacing and often a visible marking-gauge line and saw cuts that have gone slightly too far. A machine-cut joint has parts of equal width and completely even spacing. Machine-cut dovetails became common when the furniture factories took over in the second half of the 19th century, so a drawer with such joints is hardly older than that.

Facts

What is a dovetail?

A dovetail is a joint in which fan-shaped tails on one board engage in sockets in the other, so that the corner cannot be pulled apart in one direction even without glue. The name comes from the shape, which resembles the tail of a bird. In Sweden it is also called svalstjärt (swallowtail), and both words occur in auction catalogues. The joint is explained in the glossary and in the guide to furniture terms.

Joiners distinguish between the tails, the broad, flared parts on the drawer side, and the pins, the narrower parts on the drawer front that sit between them. On a drawer the front is usually half-blind dovetailed: the joint is visible only from the side, and the front is whole. At the back the joint often runs straight through and can be seen from both directions. The diagram further down lets you take the joint apart and compare the two ways of cutting it.

Hand-cut: few, broad and uneven

Before the factories, every dovetail was sawn and chiselled out by hand. The joiner first drew a line with the marking gauge for how deep the joint would go, marked out the spacing with a square and then sawed along the lines. The pins were often made very narrow, both because it looked finer and because there was less to saw and chisel away. On fine 18th-century furniture, such as the Rococo chest of drawers, the pins can be as thin as a pencil.

That gives three signs to look for. The tails are few and broad, on a smaller drawer sometimes only two or three. The spacing is uneven, so that no tail is quite like another. And the line of the marking gauge is visible as a thin scribed stripe along the joint, often with saw cuts that have gone slightly too far into the front. These are honest traces of handwork, not faults.

Machine-cut: many, equal and exact

As the furniture factories grew in the second half of the 19th century, machines arrived that routed all the tails and pins at once from a template. The joint became exact and quick to make. Tails and pins became equally wide, the spacing completely even along the whole corner and the bottom of the sockets sometimes rounded by the cutter. Gauge lines and overcut saw marks are absent, because no one needed to mark anything out.

In the United States a machine was patented in 1867 that made an entirely different joint, with round pins engaging in semicircular sockets. It is often called the Knapp joint after the inventor Charles Knapp and was used mainly in the decades around 1870–1900, so it works almost like a dating stamp. In Europe the even, machine-routed dovetails became standard in factory furniture towards the end of the 19th century, and today most are made with a router and a jig.

The drawer tells more than the front

The drawer is the part of a piece of furniture that is seldom polished up again, and it is therefore the best place to start. Pull it right out and look at both corners front and back, at the drawer bottom and at the insides. A handmade drawer often has a bottom of solid wood, chamfered at the edges so that it fits in a groove or nailed from below, and it is worked with a plane, so that the surface feels slightly undulating. Factory drawers often have thin bottoms of plywood or board, and the saw marks are straight and even.

Also compare the drawers with one another. If one drawer has machine-cut joints and the others hand-cut ones, it has probably been replaced, perhaps after damage, and that is common in old furniture. If all the joints are machine-cut while the front looks 18th-century, you probably have a later piece in an older style. The guide to dating an antique chest of drawers goes through the rest of the chest, and the same questions for chairs are in the guide to dating an antique chair.

The joint together with other clues

A dovetail never dates a piece alone. It tells you when the drawer was probably made, not what style the furniture has or whether it has been altered. The joint should therefore be read together with other clues: hand-forged nails against wire nails, hand-filed screws against machine screws, thick hand-sawn veneer against thin machine-cut veneer and straight saw marks against the arcs of the circular saw. The detail drawings further down show some of them, and how the veneer reveals age is explained in the guide to veneer and solid wood.

Be careful in the other direction too. Hand-cut dovetails do not prove that a piece of furniture is old. Arts and Crafts joiners such as Ernest Gimson deliberately showed them as a sign of honest craftsmanship, as on the cabinet from his workshop, and skilled joiners still cut them by hand today. There are also jigs that give routed joints with uneven spacing. If the joint is hand-cut but sharp, bright and without wear, there is reason to look extra carefully at the rest.

What to do with the drawer

Pull out the drawer and look at the front corner from the side. Count the tails and compare their width with that of the pins: few, broad tails with narrow pins point to hand, parts of equal width point to machine. Look for the line of the marking gauge and for saw cuts that have gone past it. Then look at the back corner, at the drawer bottom and at how it is fixed. Do the same with the other drawers, to see whether any of them is later.

Finally, compare with the style. A Karl Johan chest of drawers with hand-cut joints may very well be from the 1830s; the same form with evenly routed joints is more likely made in a factory decades later. More furniture to practise on can be found under furniture, and furniture styles in chronological order will help you place the form.

How to recognise it

Exercise

A Rococo-style chest of drawers has drawers with six equally wide tails and pins, completely even spacing and no gauge lines. What does that most probably say?