For dovetails, buy the Narex Richter bevel-edge set — and if the budget says otherwise, buy the four-piece Narex Woodline set and spend the difference on a sharpening stone. Those are the two answers worth having. The WoodRiver bench chisel set is the pick if your dovetails are small and the paring is fine; the Irwin Marples M444 set is the one to buy if the same chisels also have to chop mortises and open hinge gains on a Saturday.
This is deliberately not our general chisel ranking. If you want the chisel set to live on a bench and do everything, that page is best woodworking chisels, and if you are buying your first set at all, start with chisels for beginners. This page answers a narrower question: which of those sets is best at the specific geometry a dovetail puts in front of a chisel.
What a dovetail actually asks of a chisel
A dovetail socket is an acute corner. The tail wall leans, the baseline is square to it, and the waste you are removing sits in the sharp angle where the two meet. Three properties decide whether a chisel can get in there cleanly.
Thin side lands.A bevel-edge chisel has its sides ground back so the blade narrows towards the back face, leaving a flat strip — the land — running along each side. The thinner that land, the further into an acute corner the edge can reach before the body of the chisel bottoms out against the leaning wall. A firmer or square-edge chisel has no clearance at all and will crush the corner rather than cut it. Every set on this page is a bevel-edge pattern for this reason.
A flat back.Paring to a baseline is a registration job: the back of the chisel sits on the wood and the edge follows wherever that face points. If the back is convex, the edge dives; if it is hollow at the tip, the chisel skates and the cut wanders. The first few inches behind the edge are what matter, and flattening that area is the first thing to do with any new chisel — our chisel sharpening guide covers the sequence, including how little of the back actually needs attention.
An edge that survives paring end grain. Dovetail work is mostly end grain and cross grain, and both are hard on an edge. Harder steel holds longer and chips more readily; softer steel dulls faster and is easier to bring back. That trade-off is the main difference between the sets below, and the published hardness figures in the comparison table are the clearest expression of it.
Buy sizes, not set counts
The useful dovetail chisels are the narrow ones. A 1/4 in. does most of the work in drawer stock; a 1/8 in. or 3/16 in. earns its place in fine pins; a 1/2 in. cleans a baseline quickly; a 3/4 in. or 1 in. is for paring broad shoulders and is barely used inside the joint. A ten-piece set is not ten times more useful than a four-piece set, and a set whose sizes stop at 1/4 in. will leave you working a narrow socket with a chisel that does not fit it.
We have written the sizing question out in full in what size chisels do I need, which is the page to read before you choose between a four-piece and a six-piece set here. The short version for dovetails: 1/4 in. and 1/2 in. do the overwhelming majority of the work, and a 1/8 in. is the first addition worth making.
What we are not claiming
We have not measured land thickness with a micrometer, tested edge retention on a fixed number of cuts, or hardness-tested a single blade. The hardness figures below are what each maker publishes, and where a maker only claims a figure rather than specifying it, the table says “claimed”. Our methodology page explains how we score and what the scores are and are not.
The four sets side by side
Published listing specifications for the four sets ranked above. The hardness column is the one to read for dovetail work: it is the trade-off between how long an edge lasts in end grain and how easily it chips when you lever waste out of a socket.
| Set | Steel | Published hardness | Pieces and handles |
|---|
| Narex Richter bevel-edge (5) | Cr-V | 62 HRC (claimed) | Set of 5, ash handles |
| WoodRiver bench chisels (6) | Cr-V | RC 59–63 (published) | Set of 6, 1/4–1 in., bubinga handles |
| Narex bevel-edge Woodline (4) | Cr-Mn | About 59 HRC | Set of 4, beech handles |
| Irwin Marples M444 (6) | High-carbon | 58–61 HRC (published) | Set of 6, 1/4–1 in., wooden box |
Why the Richter set leads for this job
Two reasons, and neither is the brand. The first is the published 62 HRC claim, which is at the top of this group and is the right end of the trade-off for paring end grain: the edge stays keen through a drawer's worth of sockets rather than needing a touch-up halfway through. The second is that the Richter pattern is ground with notably fine side lands, which is exactly the geometry that lets a chisel work into the acute corner of a tail socket without bruising the wall next door.
The cost of that hardness is honest and worth stating: harder steel is less forgiving if you use a chisel as a lever or hit it into a knot. If your chisels do double duty as site tools, the softer Irwin Marples set is the better buy, and you will spend less time worrying about the edge.
None of them is sharp enough out of the box
Every set here arrives ground, not honed, and a factory grind will not pare end grain cleanly. Budget for a stone before you budget for a wider set. A 1000/6000 combination waterstone and a honing guide will take any of these four to a paring edge, and our sharpening stone roundup and honing guide roundup rank the options. If you are deciding between stone types in the first place, waterstones versus diamond plates settles it on how often you want to flatten the stone.
One dovetail-specific note on sharpening: resist the temptation to put a steeper secondary bevel on your narrow chisels to protect the edge. A 25 degree bevel pares; a 35 degree bevel pushes fibres over rather than slicing them, and in end grain you will see the difference immediately on the baseline.
The chisel is half the joint
The other half is the saw and the marking. A chisel cannot rescue a sawcut that wandered past the baseline, and it cannot find a line that was never scribed properly in the first place. If you are assembling a dovetail kit rather than replacing one tool, the three purchases that matter are a backed saw, a marking gauge and these chisels — see best dovetail saw and best marking gauge, and then how to cut dovetails for the order the work happens in.
If you would rather not cut them by hand at all, that is a legitimate answer and we have priced it: a dovetail jig and a router will produce a repeatable joint in a fraction of the time, and jig versus hand-cut is the page that compares the two honestly.
Where these numbers come from
The steel types, hardness figures, set counts and handle materials above are the manufacturers' own published listing specifications, recorded when we researched each set and cited per set in Sources. We have not hardness-tested or edge-tested anything, and the scores are judgments from documented research rather than measurements. Prices come from the live price feed and carry the date they were pulled.
