After making the bookend using a branch from a tree that is a product of nature, I did a simlar exercise with a hand carved dove-tail joint. The first picture above is the original hand carved dove-tail (my first ever 
. Below that is the reverse engineered joint where I made the tails with laser cut layers of 1/8″ masonite using the flat bed scan of the pins (the CNC router had too many small technical problems that were not worth solving at the moment). The reverse engineered tails fit more snugly than the hand carved ones while preserving the advantages of the hand carved pins (i.e. creative, subjective responses to the contingencies of wood such as the direction of the grain, knots etc.).
