Woodworking Basics
(Page 3 of 5)
June/July 2007
Story and Photos by Steve Maxwell
If you’re like I was before I tried biscuits, you may not believe these little ovals of wood could possibly be strong enough to do anything worthwhile — but they are, for two reasons. First, biscuits are compressed at the factory, and as they soak up water-based glue they swell and tighten within their grooves. Second, biscuits have a diagonal grain orientation, meaning they’re strong along both length and width.
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Standard biscuit joiners use a fully enclosed, 4-inch diameter carbide-tipped blade that extends from inside a spring-loaded safety shroud as the tool is pushed into a piece of wood. It’s possible to hurt yourself with the tool, but you’d have to try pretty hard. Inherent safety is one reason biscuit joiners are ideal for beginners.
Before you attempt biscuit joints on any project, adjust the depth of the slot to be cut by your joiner. If the slots are too shallow, the biscuit won’t have enough room, preventing the joint from coming together fully. If the slots are too deep, joint strength will suffer because the biscuit will slip too far into one side of the joint during assembly. Ideally, each slot should be about one-thirty-second inch deeper than half the width of the biscuit. Check this by cutting a slot in a piece of scrap wood. Slip a biscuit all the way in and draw a line along its length where it meets the wood surface. Turn the biscuit end for end and repeat. The two lines should overlap each other, each located slightly past the center line of the biscuit. All biscuit joiners include controls to adjust slot depth. Once you’ve tweaked the depth properly, you won’t need to do it again.
To establish guides for your joiner, bring project parts together temporarily and mark pencil lines on both parts at the joint where you want each biscuit to be. A 12-inch wide bookshelf, for instance, is plenty strong with three #20 biscuits reinforcing each shelf-to-upright joint. Separate the parts and lay them down on a flat, clean surface. Align the center mark on the face of your biscuit joiner with the pencil mark on the wood part, then plunge the slot. Repeat for the corresponding lines on the mating part. Save yourself grief by assembling all biscuit joints without glue for a final check. If there’s a problem that prevents the joint from coming together fully, you’ll want to know about it before you have glue everywhere.
Although you can use biscuit joints almost anywhere, they make the most sense in three key applications. They offer an excellent way to join horizontal shelves and uprights in bookcases, cabinets and wardrobes. You’ll find them useful for joining the stiles and rails of traditional frame-and-panel doors. Biscuits are also ideal for reinforcing intricate joints that are initially assembled with glue. I especially like to use them in this way on the back faces of mirror and picture frames. Plunge a slot or two across the assembled joint, insert biscuits with glue, then sand off the protruding biscuit after the glue has dried. (See photo in Image Gallery.)
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