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Wood Joinery

In Space and Materiality, we made 5 wood joints.

The first was a rabbet joint.

Overall, the construction of the rabbet was one of the easiest to make and tweak to size. With all my joints, I made measurement marks on my wood in pencil. Then I scored the wood with a box cutter. Once I clamped down my wood, I used a Japanese pull saw that a wood shop technician recommended for me.

I have a little experience in shaping wood from a couple years ago when I was shaping skateboard decks, but it was mostly simple line cuts. I was a little intimidated by how precise my cuts needed to be. Scoring the wood first helped a lot, and this cut was probably my easiest joint and took the least amount of sanding to fit.

My next cut was the miter joint.

This joint was pretty straight forward. In fact, I don’t think I even needed to draw measurements on the wood because once the machine was set up at a 45 degree angle, I just needed to push the wood through the straight blade machine slowly. After I made those cuts, I sanded the edges until they could sit next to each other cleanly.

 

The next was a dowel joint.

I had some trial and error with the dowels.

Once I drew the measurements, I made marks for the individual dowels with an awl. I drilled the three holes to size until they fit the dowel’s circumference. To make marks on the second piece of wood, I made marks on the tips of the dowels with a paint pen and pressed the pieces together. This seemed like a great idea, but the holes were not quite even. Unhappy with the result, I tried removing the dowels and ended up breaking them. To remedy this, I went back to the drill press. I first drilled the broken dowels out and made the holes very slightly larger on both pieces of wood. With some care and attention, I got the dowels to join the wood together cleanly.

The next piece was a finger joint.

The sketches for this joint looked deceivingly simple. For each piece, I made my measurements and scored the cut marks. However, I realized I needed to cut at an angle to begin to clear the wood. Once I made two triangular cuts, I sanded the pieces down to fit with a file. On the second piece of wood, I cut a little too deep. This didn’t effect the fit of the joint however, because I just sanded the pieces down.  

The last and most time-intensive joint was the Mortise and Tenon.

After I scored the wood, I worked on cutting out the Mortise. I first drilled a few holes in in the area I needed to remove. Then I began to chisel away at the hole until it started to form a rectangular hole. On the Tenon piece, I scored the wood with a box cutter and then used a pull saw to cut out the slot for the joint. I made a conservative cut with the saw so that I could sand it to size with a file. I spent some time bouncing between chiseling more material out of the Mortise hole and filing down the Tenon until they fit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once I finished these joints and we reviewed them in class, I decided to follow through and make the Mortise and Tenon and the Dowel joint look cleaner. Although this was the first time I have worked with wood with this level of detail, I really enjoyed using my hands and spending so much time on one task. Even though I shed a little blood for this project, I’m really glad I have a better understanding of woodworking and the care and concentration that the medium demands.

 

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