Hit 500 hand-cut dovetails this week without realizing it

I was just cleaning up my shop in Nashville after finishing a big custom cabinet job, and I started counting up the drawers I'd cut dovetails for over the last few years. Turns out I crossed 500 joints somewhere around Tuesday without even noticing. That number surprised me because I remember struggling so hard on my first few attempts back in 2018, like spending an hour on a single joint and still having gaps you could stick a nickel through. Now I can knock out a decent eight-drawer chest in a day and a half if the wood is straight and my chisels are sharp. It's funny how the milestone kind of snuck up on me, you know? I guess muscle memory just takes over after a while. Has anyone else hit a number like that and had it sneak up on them like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

lucasschmidt19d ago

Feels good when it just clicks like that.

ellis.leo19d ago

Wish my brain would click more often, feels like it's stuck on dial-up most days lol.

daniel_martin19d ago

Three hours staring at a config file yesterday before I realized it was a missing semicolon. @ellis.leo I feel you on the dial-up brain thing, some days mine's stuck on 56k too. It's rough when you know the answer is in there somewhere but it just won't surface, like when I spend twenty minutes on a terminal command I've typed a thousand times.