Woodworking Basics

Use these three powerful woodworking basics to bring your wood projects together.

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by Steve Maxwell

If you’ve got a vision for building your own furniture, storage shelves, cabinets, tables and various built-ins, there’s good news: Success has never been easier. Three revolutionary options now make it much simpler to create the kind of strong, attractive, long lasting joints necessary for woodworking success. You don’t need to spend a lot of time or money tooling up, either. You can become proficient in one afternoon with the wood joinery options you’ll learn about here.

You need to begin by understanding something fundamental about wood. You can’t simply shove the glue-covered edges of two boards together and expect the union to hold. Take a bookshelf, for instance. If you join the shelves to the uprights with glue alone, the joints will break under minimal stress. Glue is great, but it does have limitations. This is why most successful woodworking joints involve both glue and some form of interlocking connection. Understanding wood joinery is really about understanding your options for creating these all-important mechanical connections. New to woodworking? Take a look at “Woodworking Words,” below, for a glossary of basic technical terms you’ll find here.

Dowel Joints

Dowels have been used to join wood for centuries, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t kept up with the times. You’ll find dowels in everything from antique furniture to barn frames, but modern refinements make dowel joints stronger, more accurate, and quicker and easier to create.

To make a dowel joint, drill holes in mating surfaces of wood. Half the length of the dowel goes into each hole, spanning the joint line between the two parts. It’s an easy concept to understand, but there’s a technical challenge: Pairs of holes drilled across a joint must be perfectly aligned with each other. Without a high level of precision, dowel joints simply won’t come together.

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