quality > joinery
My kids say that what daddy does for a living is to take big pieces of wood, cut them into little pieces, then glue them back together to make big pieces again. I guess they are right about that. But reality is a little more complicated. Glue is really a backup system when it comes to holding two pieces of wood together; the best techniques for doing this were developed centuries before anyone knew what glue was. Or nails and screws, for that matter. The best techniques for joinery use nothing but wood, precisely fit and tightly assembled, often wedged and pinned together using only a mallet.
Two classic examples are the “through wedged tenons” and “dovetail” joints, illustrated at left. These are incredibly strong joints that will hold furniture together for centuries under normal conditions. The next time you are looking at a piece of antique furniture, preferably something a century old or more, look for these two types of joints.
While they have improved on the tools we use to make these joints, they have not improved on the joints themselves. There are any number of new products available to quickly join two pieces of wood together, but even these will fail before simple dovetails and mortise-and-tenon joints do. Many people think we use these techniques because they are ‘quaint’ and traditional, which I guess is true. But first and foremost we use them because they are incredibly strong, and will remain so until long after we are gone.
“With all the junk being produced these days, the time will soon come when people long for something that’s simply made of wood.”
~ David Bowie
