Or you could do a cutout in your table - and I thought I was a bit obsessive…
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My goodness that thing is nuts. I wonder if those steel belts are okay at that slight angle.
Don’t forget the back inside corners of the female part are round, but the corresponding corners of the male part are going to be square.
Specifically this:
And this:
It is possible to round the tops of the fingers to match the curve left on the inside of the cavities. It is somewhat complicated but it is doable. Or since it is on an interior surface that doesn’t show, you can also cheat by just chopping off the tops of the fingers so there is no interference.
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Good catch.
In the corner, I would think overcut would be fine. As long as it didn’t make it too weak.
I’ve seen this one and wanted to post about this 
I love the idea to have dovetail with a single face operation though
Yeah I put some more work in this yesterday and caught this one while inspecting the section views
Here’s what I git so far…
The drawback is that you get a small gap on the inside corner:
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In theory, edge A should be square to prevent the gap, but edge B must be rounded since the complementary part is cut using a bit with some radius:
The same is true of the female part.
The difficult part is what to do at the corner where edge A and edge B intersect. It needs to be some compound curve and it is not obvious what the correct shape is.
I found this to be a fascinating mathematical puzzle and I posted my solution a couple years ago. (Spoilers if you want the fun of solving the problem yourself.)
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I didn’t read the whole thread, but it seems like you did quite a lot of work already
I thought about adding a small straight stepdown to cover the joint too, will try this…
Some cool clamps using rubber bands, it seems to hold surprisingly well
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Ok… so… this might be feasible… but it’s not quite a simple feat
You can tll it took quite abit of persuasion to get it to “fit” 
EDIT: I think I might have cracked the code second try… damn!
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you do realize that you have an entire forum here of CNC’s and 3DPs all controlled by people that enjoy making random things just to see what would happen???
Just saying.
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wouldnt it have been easier to use a dovetail bit instead of a lollipop? Should almost be able to get hand cut dovetail look out of it.
since we’re on the dovetail topic, check out this video at 11 minutes.
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Some of the sharp corners can’t be done with the CNC, at least not milling everything flat
The inner corner of the fingers will always be rounded.
You can probably use a dovetail bit for the female part and keep a rounded top too, but it may look pretty strange
Im just going to be the first to say it, yeah I was only half thinking. For some reason the fact that no matter what shape the bit is, it spins in a circle completely skipped my mind.
This is part of the fun of those joints, they’re real brain teasers
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is it cheating to cnc from the end grain on the one side so both edges are squared off and that rounding problem disappears?
What, and you couldn’t pull a vacuum through steel? Weaksauce…
Sure, you can do this, but you need to setup your stock vertically in the CNC, which can be difficult, or impossible if you didn’t specifically design your table for this
The whole point/challenge here is to be able to machine those dovetails “flat”, all from the top of the material
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Sure, you can do this, but you need to setup your stock vertically in the CNC, which can be difficult, or impossible if you didn’t specifically design your table for this
The whole point/challenge here is to be able to machine those dovetails “flat”, all from the top of the material
Yes it is cheating.
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