Duncan Meerding: accomplishing "blind" dovetail joinery

Above: Duncan Meerding with Simeon Dux and the jigs they developed for low-vision dovetail joinery.

Words and photos: Duncan Meerding

How does a dovetail joint fit together? Without looking at one, can you imagine the angles and cuts required? The precision?

I have been slow to post anything about a project of mine from 2021. It was a big deal for me, many years in the making, and it brought up many mixed emotions. But I would now like to share the story of my first dovetail project.

Whilst at university, most of my peers were able to complete the foundation woodworking project of making a dovetailed stool. None of my teachers or peers could work out how I could do this, being legally blind and unable to see and cut to a line.

Over the next 10 years, I talked to many of my sighted peers, and many other vision impaired and blind practitioners and no one had quite worked out a technique for a blind practitioner to hand cut a dovetail.

After some brainstorming and encouragement from Adam Markowitz, I got in contact with Simeon Dux – a highly accomplished designer maker and teacher of hand cut dovetails skills.

Simeon and I were both going into uncharted territory – him working with a blind/vision impaired practitioner, and me cutting the handcut dovetail joint. In 2021, he came down from Melbourne for a week, where he was able to see how I work, and we workshopped some ideas. We worked out a process for me to cut dovetail joints, using a range of analogue jigs and guides – I will write more on the specifics another time.

Being able to adjust tail sizes, angles and positions was super important for handcutting the joints, but also to develop skills for further hand cut joinery development.

When I put together the final project, a dovetail stool, I had a bit of a tear up. It had taken a number of years to find a way to do things, a bunch of brainstorming and support from peers, Simeon’s great collaborative teaching technique and a fairly stubborn streak on my part, but I had cut my first complete dovetail project.

Showed my uni lecturer and she said it would have passed with Credit – I negotiated to a Distinction.

Duncan Meerding @duncanmeerding is an award winning woodworker and lighting designer in Hobart, Tasmania. Read about Duncan here. Read about some of the adaptive technologies which he uses here.