Dovetales

There's a long-held theory on the Old Tools List that each person has only a certain number of "bad" dovetails in them, and all you need to do is keep making dovetailed boxes for all your tools until you get them all out of your system. It's a beguiling idea, is it not? Especially when addressed to a load of collec-, er, tool accumulators who do tend to need rather a lot of tool storage... Of course, in practice, there's no knowing when a bad dovetail will come out and bite you. Naturally the bulk of them will appear early on and continue in chronological order, but like the unexpected stone in the cherry cake of life, a blip in the smooth upward curve of one's dovetailing endeavours can happen at any time.

Oh, how I'd love to be able to say this musing came to me as I gazed at my latest disastrous dovetail, but it goes without saying that I haven't a latest dovetail of any variety to gaze at. About a month ago - or was it six weeks - I did line up some off-cuts with a view to dovetailing up a simple open tray to corral the ever-growing DVD disc mountain. Heck, I even got so far as to whip out the old 043 and rustle up a groove to take a base. Alas, that was as far as the heady excitement of being in the workshop actually got. The pieces sit there now; groovy but unfinished. And the disc mountain is threatening to turn into a landslip. I will get back to it at some point, I'm sure I will, but now there's an added point to ponder: will it be one of my allotted bad dovetails...?