Woodworker's Journal 2009-33-1, страница 94

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Basic Butt Joints

It's a Frame-up

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. his year, Skill Builder will be teaching six key woodworking joints, and there's no better place to start than the basic butt joint: The square-cut ends or edges of two parts simply butt together to form a panel, a frame, a box, a drawer or a carcass. It's a great quick joint when the speed of making and assembling a project is paramount. There's no need to size the parts with added lengths, as with mortise and tenon joints, and no time-consuming machining of the joints themselves. Every time you glue together two boards to make a wider panel, you're cre-

Stile & Rail Butt Joint

End grain to edge grain

ating a butt joint. Butt joints can be made by joining parts edge-to-edge, as boards forming a wide panel; edge-to-end, as face frame members are in a cabinet frame; or edge-to-face, as found at the corner of a box or the dividers in a drawer.

Although simple to make, end grain butt joints are the weakest of all joints. Glue forms a strong bond between solid-wood parts butted edge-to-edge, but it offers little strength for other varieties of butt joints. Adding nails to a glued assembly, like a plywood or MDF box, adds some strength, and the nails help hold the workpieces

Test cuts on your saw (top photo) will ensure that both parts of a butt joint are square. Learn about more options for making butt joints — including pocket screw joinery (middle and bottom photos) — at our website; woodworkersjournal.com.

together as the glue dries. However, it's best to reserve this kind of construction for light-duty uses — never use glued and nailed butt joints to build a furniture frame or cabinet carcass intended for heavy-duty use.

For sturdier, long-lasting butt joints, you need to add some reinforcement. The easiest way to reinforce a butt joint is with glue blocks, for example, added inside the corners of a carcass assembly. For even greater strength, butts can be reinforced with dowels, biscuits, splines, pocket screws or butterfly inlays. Most of these are easy to add to a basic butt joint, but they'll require some machine work.

—Sandor Nagyszalanczy ^

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Finger and Lap Joints

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Skill Builder

For a more detailed article on butt joints,

go to woodworkersjournal.com and click on the More on the Web tab. Or send a large SASE to Woodworker's Journal, Skill Builder 7, 4365 Willow Drive, Medina, MN 55340.

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February 2009 Woodworker's Journal