After teaching thousands of students to cut dovetails by hand and dealing with the problems they had when using traditional dovetail saws, I decided to design and build a dovetail saw to solve these problems.

My Rob Cosman Dovetail Saw is the best saw for dovetails and is designed for rip sawing that leaves a smooth, ready-to-glue, finished surface.

I designed my dovetail saw with a .020" thin blade, 22 tpi starting teeth and 15 tpi sawing teeth, filed rip, with a minimal 2000th inch (0.002) set per side. The relaxed cutting angle of the small front teeth allows you to start the cut with ease - a major issue with other saws!  The teeth, formed with a diamond-saw, slice cleanly and precisely through wood fibers.  The minimal set creates a small kerf that guides the saw straight in the crosscut while the shallow 1-5/8 inch depth of blade (tooth-line to brass back) helps with stability while sawing to a line. The pistol grip handle conforms to your hand for a perfect, repeatable fit every time.

Product Details:

• Size. Overall length (Toe to Handle tip): 15 - 1/8 inches.  Blade length (Toe to heal): 10 inches. Depth of plate under the back: 1 - 5/8 inches.

• Weight: 22-24 ounces. 

• Blade. Each of our dovetail saw blades is made from .020 thick, spring steel.

• Tooth Geometry.  Filed rip with a two-stage pitch. The first two inches of each dovetail saw is filed at 22 teeth per inch (TPI) and a 30 degree negative tooth rake, which allows you to easily start a cut. The rest of the blade is filed at 15 tpi and a 0 degree tooth rake allowing you to finish the cut with just a few strokes.

• Set. Unlike most saw manufacturers who stamp out their saw teeth, leaving "dimples" in the blade, we individually cut out each of our saw teeth with a diamond saw.  This allows us to maintain a very slight set of only .002 inch (per side), since we don't introduce that "dimple" onto the blade.  This slight set produces a narrow .024 inch kerf that eliminates slop allowing the saw blade to accurately track in the saw kerf resulting in dead straight saw cuts with smooth ready-to-glue surfaces.

• Brass Back: Rob Cosman dovetail saws have a 1/4″ thick x 7/8″ wide brass back secured to the blade with peened and flushed copper pins.  Not only does the brass look wonderful but it imparts extra weight to the saw, as compared to other saws, that provides you a better balanced saw, allows the saw to do the cutting work, and helps you "feel" perpendicular.

• Handle. Our unique "pistol grip" handles have memory enhancing carved finger recesses for a perfect and comfortable fit. A pair of brass split nuts secures the handle to the blade and the brass back.  Our standard saw handles are available in Swanstone, a resin-composite material reinforced with glass for durability.  

• Handle Size & Determining your Size: Our handles come in two sizes: Regular and Large.  Please refer to the picture above showing how to measure your hand and determine what size handle is correct for you size hand.