A very useful step in cutting the dovetail slots on an inclined sheet would be to use the Forge’s camera to guide future cuts to follow the edges of previous cuts. The camera will see both the top surface of the inclined sheet, as well as the internal edges of the previous cuts, due to the incline. I imagine this will make the automatic recognition of where to cut very difficult. Is there any manual mode that can be used, where cut locations can be “drawn,” or otherwise identified by the user, on the photographic image produced by the Forge?
I think you will want a bit more angle then that.
I did the math on a 2 degree angle and 1/4" stock (hopefully correctly 
) and the offset from top to bottom is only .0087" (tan 2 * .25 = .0087"). Obviously on 1/8" stock it would be half that.
That is really small as far as wood is concerned, and probably not enough to securely lock the pieces together. As a comparison, I think “traditional” dovetails are usually between 7 and 12 degrees. I doubt to exact angle matters that much, but 2 is mighty small and you might as well just use straight box joints.
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Thanks for the feedback! I appreciate the voice of experience. If we go with 7 degrees, then we only get a 4" joint length.
I have two words for this sort of situation.
Experiment, experiment.
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Wisdom born of experience?
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I love this thread!!
I keep wanting to try cubism when slants are hard. Thank you for barnstorming. 
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Ah, if only I had a laser to do so…
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Ah, you’ve captured the true essence of making real progress and discoveries! As Yoda would say, “Wise truly, you are”.
Interesting that people are still thinking conventionally about this. Cutting on an inclined plane is a good solution to get a trapezoidal cut. Someone else suggested just cutting parallelograms which is a creative way of having to avoid doing two separate cuts. The laser on a GF will be very accurate, but realigning after a clumsy human hand moved something might prove to be more challenging. Less moves is probably going to be easier.
Another thing to consider, is the engraving approach. why not deliberately engrave the sides to have large steps? The suggestions at the top of the thread are doing small steps to simulate an inclined plane - why bother? The effect we are going for here is aesthetic appeal. (A finger joint could be cut in the same space that give more surface area, so we are probably doing this for the cool look) Cutting steps would give you a lot of surface area to glue, and it would look interesting and unusual.
Also not mentioned - if the piece wasn’t very deep, you could probably cut it from the end and do all kinds of crazy engraving style cuts.
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A far easier way to achieve Dovetail with laser (plus chisel): https://www.flickr.com/photos/funnypolynomial/sets/72157657942214811/
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Nice! Bookmarked that for future reference.
Very nice. Well thought through. I like the alignment mark for the chisel and the pre-score (which could be a 3D engrave on a GF) because otherwise those cuts are bleeping annoying to do right.
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That’s flipping clever and the perfect solution for a project request from my wife!
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Genius! (even I can handle that.) 
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Oh wow that turned out beautiful! And to be honest, I’m kind of in the camp where I don’t like having an all-charred edge on my boxes!
I’d forgotten completely about that chisel technique! Laser crazy as I am, the method looks very efficient, and I’m even more efficiency oriented. Thanks for the reminder! 
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I thought efficient as well. On the quest to zero. I think we had lot s of good ideas back in the day that have been long lost.
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Forgotten from the deep history of April… 
I’m a actually working on the project I mentioned back then, but my wife is now requesting tab joints. I’m still more likely to try this than taking the time to engrave the angles.
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