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Lap Joints

Stronger than simple butts. Cut notches where two sticks cross so that they lock each other in place. Use shallow (1/4" to3/8") cuts in small stock and cut no deeper than halfway through sticks over 2" thick. This is an eyeball operation. At first it is best to experiment with scrap stock to learn to make notches that are snug at meeting sides, with the flat and perfectly mated bottoms that make snug joints. Taint easy. Above all, use a sharp knife!

Mortise/Tenon

Here, a round peg goes into a round hole at approximately a 90° angle and it is fixed by natural shrinkage, glue, pins, pegs, wedges, or a combination. There is more to it, however, than just whittling a male (tenon) end and drilling a female (mortise) to fit. See the illustrations. Nature offers a mortise/tenon fastener that is as effective and more ap propriate than glue: natural shrinkage. If you whittle tenons from superdry stock and drill mortises into relatively green stock, the latter will shrink as it dries and the joint will hold forever, even if the wood gets a little wet, as both pieces will swell together. I keep dry rung wood (straight pieces 1-2 inches thick and 3 or 4 feet long) behind the wood stove in my shop. It is ready whenever I spot an especially alluring chunk of driftwood, a supertwiggy (abandoned) robin's nest, an imaginatively craggy dogwood branch, or loop-the-looping bittersweet vine. In a pinch you can cheat by making rungs from bone-dry hardwood dowel from the hardware store and disguising it by gluing on a covering of birch bark. Don't tell anyone where you got the idea though—I do have a reputation to uphold.

For indoor, Elmer's-type yellow wood glue is good and Titebond is better if you make snug joints and clamp them tight enough to squeeze out almost all the glue. However, till you get more skilled at it than I, hand-whittled, often eyeball-aligned joints are too sloppy for wood glue. You need a gap-filling adhesive. The best (and the salvation of the part-time twigfurniture maker) is two-part epoxy that comes in the plastic dual syringes you see in shrink-packs hanging off impulse-sale racks everywhere. Don't get it from the grocery, though. Go to a woodworkers outlet and buy the slowest setting (1 hour at minimum) clear epoxy they carry. The long-setting variety makes a stronger bond and gives you more time to adjust and rework than the 1- or 5-minute varieties. Have a box of disposable tissue on hand to wipe away any excess that oozes out around tenons and butt joints. Get it off before it sets into an ugly blob.

Not even epoxy will hold long in outdoor furniture; design yours to be fastened with stout, tight joints and use stainless steel or fat, good-holding aluminum nails. It is a good idea to treat skinned poles and water-absorbing bark of outdoor pieces with deck preservative before assembly. Birch and wild cherry bark are waterproof and preservative resistent, but the wood inside will get soft and punky in time and collapse, leaving cylinders of bark intact. I like to drill deep, shallow holes in the ends of dry but still-rough poles and set each end in a can of preservative for a month or longer before I use it.

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