Mar 2, 2010

Woodworking Techniques For Butt Joints

What are butt joints? Butt Joints are actually simple woodworking techniques and they are the basic method to joint 2 pieces of wood. It is not very strong compared to other joints, but it is extremely useful in some cases.

When you butt or joint a piece of stock against another stock with glue, that is called a butt joint. Normally, the joint is strengthen with nails or screws.

To make quality butt joint, you need to ensure that both end of the boards or stocks have good contact and to do this, you need to cut them as square as possible. To get the square, you should use mitre saw. However you may also obtained the square if you use circular saw together with a layout square. Remember to set the circular saw blade angle to zero degrees.

Butt joints are woodworking techniques which obtain its durability and strength from the glue applied at the joints. Despite that, there are still some problems with using glue as the only way to hold the joints.

The first problem is, whenever you apply glue to the stock’s end grain, the glue have the tendency to absorb more into the stock, compared to applying the glue to the stock’s side grain. Do you know that the most porous section of a wood is the end grain? So, you might need to apply more glue at the joint.

The second problem is, glue shall not supply much of lateral strength, thus the use nails or screws is highly recommended to make the joint stronger.

In the event you use hardwood for your woodwork project, make sure you drill pilot holes first prior to putting in the screws . This is to avoid the stock from splitting and cause you more problem.

There are in fact a lot of possible methods to join 2 pieces of wood. Some of them might involve advanced woodworking techniques. The simplest method is the butt joint and it can be perfectly sufficient under some conditions.

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