This Simple Joint is Stronger Than a Dovetail!

The stocks are much

stronger

than I expected and I'll show you how other

joint

s like the rabbit miter

dovetail

and box

joint

compare so you can stop that little voice in your head from asking if

this

is strong enough, oh, and if you think the

dovetail

is in the end, you might be surprised. I previously showed my incompetence by not being able to crack a

simple

joint, so I headed to the promised land, crossed the border with a trunk full of joints and visited my friend Suan, who I like to take. advantage of him helping me devise a way to successfully break cigarette butts.

What kind of butts did they think he was talking about now? I know why you're all here. Dovetails are so ubiquitous that even most knowledgeable non-logging furniture workers know what they are. but I will let you know if you think the dovetail is the strongest, think again because of the way the angled tails capture the docking board pins, it prevents the docking piece from separating in

this

direction. This is a great example of what is called mechanical advantage and is the main argument people use to promote the use of dovetails. There is no doubt that dovetails add that fifteenth piece of shine to your furniture.

However, dovetails are definitely the slowest joint to make of all the joints you will see in In this video, you can use all hand tools, all power tools, or somewhere in between for the five joints I made for this video . I chose to use my Lee router jig which is possibly the most robust jig to come out of the 90s router. I do all the crazy stuff and this allows me to make super repeatable tight dovetails after about a fortnight of marking The Jig If I had tried to cut them by hand, it probably would have taken me a whole minute wait, so that nagging voice in the back of your mind asks if his strength matches his reputation.

Dov's tail scored 1.88 lbs of strength on average. the failure pattern is exactly the same on each of my test joints you can see that in the tail the wood grain failed as if I drew a straight line from the inside of each tail which makes it suspiciously end up looking like a joint box, so in this case the glue was

stronger

than the wood itself, so if the glue is stronger, why is the mechanical advantage so impressive? The plot goes hand in hand with the idea that glue will eventually and inevitably fail back in the day when hiding glue that was made from crushed animals was your only option, yes that glue sucks and doesn't last forever so It was a good idea to use a joint like a dovetail, but now we have modern PVA glues that for the last 75 years haven't given us much reason to believe they will fail as long as a piece of furniture is not left out. in the rain and to be clear we are talking about timelines that far exceed our lifetimes but wait they argue that you should use high glue when you want things to fall apart in the future if some nerd 100 years from now wants repair a drawer I made, so good luck because I'm not using high glue as the box joint doesn't have the same geometry which can fail on a dovetail.

Can he really be stronger if you're in the camp he was in? For those who believe that wood glue is stronger than the wood itself, then it seems logical that a box joint is in fact stronger than a dovetail, although a box joint has no mechanical advantage. The nice thing about box joints is that they are much easier to cut than a dovetail, you only need one setup on the table saw or router table to achieve both sides of the joint and although it is repetitive, it goes a long way. faster and it's pretty easy to get a perfect fit and I'm I'm going to stop and put a big ol' asteris on tight and I'll come back to that in a minute because, um, let's say there's definitely a problem with a lot of drawers that I've paid for in the past.

Oh, stop complaining, most importantly. That in carpentry or carpentry in general, finding a good fit can really be a challenge when it comes to finding a therapist and I'm happy to tell you about today's sponsor, Betterhelp. Better Help's mission is to make therapy more affordable and accessible, and this is an important mission because finding a therapist can be very difficult, especially when you are limited to the options in your area. Best Help is a platform that makes it easy to find a therapist because it is online, remote and by completing a few questions, Best Help can match you with a professional therapist in just a few days, it is easy to sign up and get matched with a therapist and If it doesn't seem like a good fit, you can easily switch to a new therapist at no additional cost and without stressing about insurance or who's in your network or anything, regardless of whether you have a clinical mental health issue like depression or anxiety.

Or if you are simply a human being living in this world and going through a difficult time, therapy can give you tools to approach your life in a very different way. I visited a therapist when I was a teenager and it had a big impact on how I learn to communicate my feelings with the people closest to me, so consider online therapy with better help by clicking the link in the description or Visit Betterhelp.com Scot Wals to get 10% off your first month thanks to Betterhelp for sponsoring this video. The thing about the Box joint and all the joints we are going to talk about today is that they are all used joints. in specific orientations when joining two pieces of wood this way, not like this, not like that, not even like that.

I've covered some of the other woodworking situations in other videos, but all of the joints in this video, like the Dov tail and box joint, are to be used to make things like wall-hung boxes, crates, or drawers, It would be much easier for me to break each of these like I did before by putting Force under the end and essentially just rotating them, but when it comes to the stress that these types of joints are normally exposed to, like opening a drawer, it is more enlightening to just separate this joint in a straight line, so our welded structure that we made prevents the joints from rotating, so it also took a lot more force to break these joints so that the box is the joint a dovetail low effort that is actually stronger?

No, this was basically the biggest disappointment of my entire life because before this I fully believe that box joints were going to be much stronger than dovetails. The box gasket unfortunately scored 754 lb, but it sets. worse, the butt joint you saw at the beginning scored 133 lbs, how could the butt joint not only be worse than a dovetail but much worse than a

simple

butt joint? Well, remember that asterisk from a couple of minutes ago, yes, that I think the adjustment had something to do with it. I make the box joints reasonably tight, but not so tight that I can't just snap them together.

What I think happened is that most of the glue came out of the joint while they were being attached. This is what is known as a glueless joint, so that makes these numbers completely invalid. Well, the box joint was as tight as Dov's tail, so the dovetail was probably out of glue too, but in that case the glue didn't fail. The wood failed and was generally stronger due to the mechanical advantage. Now on all the joints in this test I used a fresh bottle of Typon 3. The glue was spread generously on each bait surface and on both sides of the joint and the joints I am testing.

They were made about 4 months ago, the hysterical part of all this is that I have made dozens of drawers using box joints over the years, and they are probably all lacking glue because I tend to aim for the same type of fit every time that something goes wrong. No, this worries me, no, but maybe there is something faster and stronger that probably foreshadows one of the first unions you will make after graduating. Simply screwing or nailing two boards together is the rabbit hole. It is an easy union in all aspects, but before the test. I thought it was barely better than a butt joint, but as you see, I was very wrong, so why didn't I think that rabbit isn't much better than a butt joint?

Well, because apparently it's some kind of butt joint. since a butt joint is just an end grain here glued to a long grain here a rabbit, well it's just an etch here glued to a long grain here and an etch here glued to a long grain here and it has about 50% more of surface area than a normal butt joint, so the rabbit is 50% stronger. Notice that almost none of the wood failed on these rabbits, almost all of it was glue failure. Make a mental note of this and I'll circle back to it. minute at an average of 2,118 pounds, the rabbit is actually over 60% stronger than a butt joint and, even more interesting, 177% stronger than a dovetail, not bad at all for a joint without any mechanical advantage.

Hey, wait a minute, right? Add mechanical advantage to basically any joint and make it stronger. Yes, you can add pegs to rabbits, but is it really a good idea? The best thing about a rabbit is that it is fairly easy to reinforce and I added three pegs to each joint if you wish. I don't worry too much about appearance and speed is essential. I simply use the drill freehand, combining rabbits with dowels, it is exactly what I do to facilitate the drawers in the workshop and you see me do it for my workbench and if it is missing 15 pieces. of flash, then you can also use a contrasting wood for the dalls to make the rabbits look great and the little voice in your head seems to think it should be louder, right?

He actually scored more than 30% weaker than the normal Rabbit. No reinforcement averaging 14462 2 lb What is happening here, well, drilling holes through the joint reduces the surface area of ​​the joint a bit and the dowels can create additional stresses that weren't there before as pressure is put on the joint, at least this is what I'm thinking as you can see the entire joint basically exploded and it's pretty consistent across all five joints except maybe the fifth one here. This is a very different image than the normal rabbit that broke very cleanly. You see a failing joint. It doesn't always fail at the glue line, there are weaknesses around the joint that can fail before the glue fails, which I think is one of the number one points of confusion I've seen in the comments sections on other videos. resistance tests of the joints that I have seen.

I've done it before just because wood fails before glue, that doesn't invalidate the test, it's just that the joint is inherently weak in its design. This is also why I am breaking five from each board and eliminating the strongest and weakest values. to remove any outliers and then when I average the middle three results I have a good idea of ​​the average resistance. The miter seems harmless enough. It has a clean and modern look, but similar to the rabbit. Isn't it just like a butt joint similar to? the rabbit will also exceed our expectations if you ask most carpenters and the little voice inside your head will probably tell you that the MERS probably aren't that strong.

This was also my opinion before this test because the 45° face also just looks like a bunch of etching, so isn't that like a nice joint, kid? I made a mistake? butt joint, clearly a miter is not just a bunch of Eng grein and is worth a lot more than people think and note that each joint broke perfectly at the glue line meaning now there were no failures in the wood, like the rabbit. The miter can also be reinforced in several ways, but first I want to emphasize that the tests I am doing are not even exhaustive, in fact, they are quite crude and should be taken with a grain of salt because they do not.

This explains an important aspect: longevity. Now I have full faith in modern PVA glues, but some of these joints are more susceptible to wood movement due to humidity changes throughout the year, particularly our super strong miter as the wood circulates between dry air and wet. Its dimensions will essentially change, this is as if someone moved this joint back and forth over and over over the years, so if the miter is already so strong, is there any need to reinforce it or, as Does the rabbit do it, does strengthening a miter actually make it weaker? One way to reinforce a miter is to use a dowel or domino jig, but none of the joints in this video require a domino or jig to make, so I'm not going to start now.

All of the joints in this video can be made with a table saw or router table. A slightly less common way to reinforce a miter is to add a long spline to the mating slots cut into the inside faces of a miter. The good thing about this type of grooves is that they facilitate gluing because themiter just aligns that annoying little voice seems to think it must be stronger than a plain old miter, right, yeah no, this BL reinforced miter dial was pretty disappointing, 1662 lb, a little weaker than the regular miter, you can see how each one of these joints broke in exactly the same way where the fiber around the slot failed and the slot remained intact, but wait.

I can already hear you writing. There is a better way to reinforce miters. Yes, the most common way to do this is to wait. until the miters are dry, then cut slits in the corners which you then glue in some serrations that act as stitches between the two parts. It's pretty easy, but it's a completely separate step from creating the miters, so overall, add a little time as a side note if that nagging voice in your head is wondering how long you need to leave the clamps on. joint until the glue dries. My friend Somon, who will help me with this test, will be releasing a video today testing the strength of the glue. a short period of time so you can remove those clamps sooner, maybe watch the video to find out if these reinforced miters can be stronger than the other one, well it doesn't look like the grain can be split the same way so maybe be even louder than a normal holy miter, those were loud and you can see that although the flute just fell out of place. groove, the wood did not fail anywhere and besides the Enigma that was the box joint, all the joints where the wood did not fail and the glue failed got better marks than those where the wood failed, so it seems that the glue line is in fact stronger than the wood itself, how does that theory hold up over a long period of time?

It's hard to say, and how this joint got 2757 lb Bonkers and that is the strongest joint of all these joints, including the dub cola. Miter might be the most powerful of them all, but I've made the weakest joint, the Box joint, dozens of times and they've been abused for years and still hold up well. These tests are just that and it's entertaining to watch, but they should not be taken as black and white recommendations from me, so go ahead and make all these joints in this video have fun, find out what you like best and put an end to that annoying voice asking if any of these joints are strong enough to remake all these drawers