---
title: "Wooden Nickel Home"
url: https://woodennickelhome.com/
description: "Vintage mid-century furniture and Scandinavian home decor with modern bohemian accents: a chronological journal of repair, finishing and living with older pieces."
---

# Wooden Nickel Home

## Reading a dovetail drawer

18 November 2014 · filed under [vintage](https://woodennickelhome.com/vintage), [workshops](https://woodennickelhome.com/workshop)

Pull a drawer all the way out and turn it on its side. The corner joint will tell you more about the piece than the finish ever does, and it takes about four seconds to read once you know what you are looking at.

Hand-cut dovetails are uneven. The pins are narrow, often narrower than a pencil, and the spacing wanders a little because a person laid them out with a marking gauge and a bevel. You will usually see a faint scribe line running across the end grain where the gauge was set, and that line does not stop at the joint. It runs the full width of the board because the maker scored it in one pass.

Machine-cut dovetails from the late nineteenth century onward are the opposite. The pins and tails are the same width as each other, the spacing repeats exactly, and there is no scribe line at all. Neither is better. A drawer cut on a jig in 1958 can outlast a hand-cut one from 1890 if the wood was dry and the glue was good.

Drawer sides are the quiet indicator. Solid timber sides, usually a secondary species like poplar, birch or pine, mean the drawer was built as a box. Look at the bottom panel too: a thin solid panel that sits in a groove and is free to move is an older habit, while a plywood bottom stapled into a rebate is later work.

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