Skip to content
Woodworking Math

Half-blind dovetail

A half-blind dovetail hides the joint from one face. The front board is not cut through: its pins stop short of the face, leaving a lap of solid wood that covers the ends of the tails. Rockler calls it a single-lap dovetail and names the drawer front as its usual home, where the front should look plain while the sides still lock into it.

The lap

Because the sockets for the tails are cut only part way into the front, the front board is thicker than the tails are long. The tails’ length is the depth of the sockets, and what is left in front of them is the lap. Set two gauges: one for the socket depth on the end of the front, one for the tail length on the drawer side, and keep the two the same.

Slope and spacing

Dovetails are traditionally cut at 1:6 in softwood and 1:8 in hardwood.

The tails are laid out exactly as for a through dovetail, with half pins at the top and bottom edges of the drawer side. The same slope ratios apply, and they are a tradition rather than a measured rule.

Traditional rule, stated by Fine Woodworking (Taunton Press), Lee Valley Tools and Rockler

Cutting it

By hand, the sockets in the front are sawn at an angle as far as the lines allow and the rest is chopped out with a chisel, working from the end grain and the inside face. The most common machine method is a router dovetail jig, which cuts the front and side together with one dovetail bit; its manual sets the bit depth and bushing, and those settings fix the joint’s proportions.

Calculators and charts

Related joints

Sources

  1. Rockler, Woodworking furniture joinery: butt joints, mortise and tenon, dovetails, read 2026-11-07
  2. Fine Woodworking (Taunton Press), Chris Gochnour, "Laying Out Dovetails", Fine Woodworking #190 (2007), read 2026-11-07
  3. Lee Valley Tools, Veritas Dovetail Markers (1:6 softwood, 1:8 hardwood), product 73357, read 2026-11-07
  4. Rockler, Rockler Dovetail Saddle Squares (1:6 and 1:8), read 2026-11-07

Proportions marked as a traditional rule are shop tradition, not measurements. This site gives no joint-strength numbers: the published tests each used a different rig.

How sources are counted and labelled: how we source these numbers.