Amaze your friends with quadrilateral and rising dovetails.

By Roy Underhill

Pages: 38-39

From the November 2011 issue #193

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An ordinary day in the shop, but suddenly, you’re dovetailing through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. You’re on a journey into a woodworking land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead, your next stop … The “Impossitails” Zone!

In the ordinary world, we accept the limitations of dovetails. They’re strong in most directions, but no matter how tight you cut them, they always have one plane of weakness – they can pull apart in the same direction that they were put together. That’s why, starting in the times of Dante and de Sade, certain deviant minds of woodworking began the quest for dovetails that interlock for eternity, configured so that the joint confronts solid wood in every direction. The dovetails they created can never come apart. Problem is, they can also never go together.

Or so it seems. Welcome to the world of impossitails – joints that exploit our tendency to think at right angles to create the illusion of impossibility. We’ll look at two of these joints, the quadratail and the rising dovetail – unlocking their secrets with the key of imagination.

The ‘Quadratail’

… is a sliding dovetail scarf joint that connects two lengths of square stock with dovetails showing on all four faces. Now, a dovetail emerging on two opposing faces would make sense; you could just slide them together. But four? Our mind connects the dovetails through the joint at right angles to the four surfaces, forming a mental interior in the shape of a plus sign – impossible to slide together, but there it is!

The trick is that the dovetails connect obliquely through adjacent corners rather than directly across. Because the diagonal paths of the two sliding dovetails are parallel, the joint easily slides together and apart, but only at 45° to the faces.

Creating the illusion calls for precise saw and chisel work, but it’s easy enough. Simply draw equal dovetails on all four faces then saw and chisel them out on the diagonal. One becomes the positive and the other negative space – one the dovetail and one the socket.

The Rising Dovetail

… is even more irritating, and far easier to cut than to explain. Here, you create the dovetail illusion by exposing an oblique slice of a triangular prism. It’s called the rising dovetail because the tenon slides upward in the mortise to fill the exposed dovetail-shaped space.

This is the trick behind the notorious puzzle mallets from the turn of the last century (and an article you can read in the April 2012 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine). This is not a particularly strong joint when used in equally-sized stock. The only place I have seen the rising dovetail used in furniture is in the teacher’s lectern in a little schoolhouse at a Colonial Virginia plantation.

The T-shaped foot of the lectern that faces the students was joined with a rising dovetail, posing a perpetual question and the lesson that things are not always as we suppose them to be!

Some of the old books advise you to glue these impossitails together “so that the secret may not be discovered.” I’d leave them loose so that others can enjoy the mystery. It just depends upon how irksome you want to be. PWM

Roy is the host of “The Woodwright’s Shop,” the longest-running woodworking show on television (now in its 31st season on PBS).

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From the November 2011 issue #193

Buy this issue now