Finished off the dovetail practice box last weekend.

Lessons Learned:

• Dovetails are hard because there is so much chiseling of end grain.
• Patience grasshopper. Grrr.
• Trimming up the protruding ends to match the adjacent surface is harder than it looks, especially when one end of the box is really short and it is hard to move the hand plane over only 1/2 of the surface, resulting in a ton of chipped out tails/pins. Yuck.
• Rounding off the edges is a great way to cover up the chip-out (see above)
• Yes, dovetails can be patched if you catch it early enough.

Thanks to David Barron for the nice dovetail guide, however, I’m glad I bought one while they were still made of wood.