The Dove Tail Joint

Years ago, just when the coffee shop thing was beginning to explode I got a phone call from a friend.  He asked me if I wanted to invest in a coffee shop.  You know the type by now...the comfortable couches, the funky decor, the nice music playing, the hand poured coffee, the food, etc.

I said sure.

There were four investors in total and we were looking at a beautiful location on the corner of Telegraph Ave in Berkeley for it.  Lots of windows, an upstairs, outside sitting as well.  It would be perfect.

One of the early meetings was to come up with a name.  One of the names I came into the meeting with was "The Dovetail Joint".  The other three liked it initially as they were thinking Berkeley, dove, peace and love.  They were discussing it and I said "Actually I was thinking we could tie in the dovetail woodworking joint into the decor and look at this sketch I did of a logo with it".  They looked at me very puzzled.  It turns out they were completely clueless to the dovetail joint being used to hold pieces of wood together.

I was absolutely dumbfounded.  The dovetail is so old in human history I just figured it was in our DNA by now and everyone would automatically know about it.

Nope.  They had never heard of it.  It predates written history.  It's held together every important and unimportant thing since the beginning.  You see it everywhere and yet to them it was the tail of a dove.

Ultimately the name was struck down.  Too druggy they thought, too dive-y.  Not going to tell you the name we (they) picked as it bored me to tears it was so pedestrian.

Past week or so I've been cutting I don't know how many dovetails for drawers for a cabinet I'm making. Using a combination of cutting them by hand and a bit of routing.  Normally I would use the WoodRat to cut them as they make the most hand cut looking dovetails out there by far but I wanted to keep up the hand skills so decided to do them that way.  The WoodRat can cut them with 1 to 9 slope which is unheard of in the machine world.

But these took awhile.  Just now starting to glue them together.  I'll post up finished pics.
Edit. Here's a look at the next phase of this which looks like will take a long long time to complete.