Dovetailed Drawers
Also called drawer joints.
Typical period: Varies
The most useful single check on any piece of case furniture, and it takes five seconds. Pull a drawer out and look at the joint — hand-cut and machine-cut dovetails are unmistakably different once you know what to look for.
What you are looking at
Interlocking wedge-shaped joints at the corners of a drawer, visible on the side when the drawer is pulled out.
How to date it
- Hand-cut: few dovetails, irregular in size and spacing, with visible scribe lines where the maker marked them out. Pins are usually narrow and angled unevenly.
- Machine-cut: many dovetails, perfectly uniform, evenly spaced, with rounded bottoms from a router bit.
- Knapp joint — a distinctive half-moon and pin pattern — dates to roughly 1870 to 1900 in American furniture and nothing else.
- No dovetails at all, with staples, dowels or glue blocks, means twentieth century or later.
Spotting a reproduction
- Machine dovetails cut to look irregular are still uniform in depth; hand-cut ones vary.
- Look at the interior of the drawer for saw marks, and at the drawer bottom, which should show shrinkage across the grain.
- Artificial wear applied to a reproduction is usually in the wrong place — real wear is on the runners and the drawer front edges.
What it is worth
Joint type dates a piece; it does not value it. A hand-dovetailed drawer in a common late Victorian chest adds nothing to a price driven by form, timber and condition.
Confused with
Uniformity is the giveaway. If every joint is identical, a machine cut it, and machine dovetailing spreads through the 1860s onward.
Questions about this
How do you date dovetailed drawers?
Hand-cut: few dovetails, irregular in size and spacing, with visible scribe lines where the maker marked them out. Pins are usually narrow and angled unevenly. Machine-cut: many dovetails, perfectly uniform, evenly spaced, with rounded bottoms from a router bit.
How do you spot a reproduction?
Machine dovetails cut to look irregular are still uniform in depth; hand-cut ones vary.
Are dovetailed drawers valuable?
Joint type dates a piece; it does not value it. A hand-dovetailed drawer in a common late Victorian chest adds nothing to a price driven by form, timber and condition.