Is It All Wood With Fancy “Whatchmacallits” (Dovetails) Or Are You Using Nails And Screws?

I used a combination of old fashioned joinery, new fangled joinery (biscuits) and hardware i.e., nailing and screwing pieces together. It depended on what was needed.

I dovetailed the front of the drawers (pictured right) because with the constant pushing and pulling these joints need the extra support.



Pictured below are the hand cut mortises (fancy workshop talk for a rectangular hole) I chiseled for the base cabinet crossbars. The tenons (fancy workshop talk for the rectangular end of a piece of wood you cram into a mortise) for the cross bars were crafted using a table saw. I used mortise and tenon joints here for two reasons. First, because I could not figure out any other way to connect them without the joinery being visible. Yeah, yeah I know I should have asked Jack, but then I couldn’t have reason two, which was to be able to say I hand crafted mortise and tenon joints.


Which brings me to another point of Workshop Wisdom: Limit the number of things you have to get right! Mortise and tenon joints are hard because there are a lot of things one needs to get right. You have to be sure the width, length, location, side angles and depth of the mortises and tenons are all correct. Biscuit joinery is much simpler. You use a special tool to cut a slit into the pieces to be joined. Then, insert a wooden biscuit into the slits when you glue up the pieces. The tool cuts the slits with uniform thickness and depth and guides the cut to the proper angle. All you need to get exactly right is the locations of the slits. The result is straighter, more square, easier to make joints and fewer chisel gouges on your fingers. Yes chisel gouges hurt.