When gluing up edge joints, you want to maintain proper alignment of the boards to produce a flat panel. Especially for small shop woodworkers, it takes a lot of work to flatten glued up panels, which accounts for the proliferation of specialized clamps and devices designed to keep the boards aligned during glue up.

Maintaining alignment

The simplest reliably effective answer is a tool you probably already own: the biscuit joiner. Start with flat boards and good edge joints. Place #20, #10, or #0 biscuits typically 8-12″ apart and just a couple of inches or so from the ends. Remember to account for the trim allowance so you do not leave an exposed biscuit in a tabletop.

The most consistent results come by pressing the joiner’s fence against the reference face of the board, which is secured slightly overhanging the edge of the workbench. Even for “standard” 3/4″ stock, this is easier and more reliable than trying to register the board itself against the bench and using the sole of the joiner as a reference.

Make sure the fence is flat and exactly square to the joiner’s face. Test to make sure the fence is also parallel to the blade/slot and if necessary, shim the fence with tape to achieve this. You can even use a 5/32″ slotting bit in a router to make the slots if you don’t have a dedicated joiner.

The biscuits are not necessary for strength. A well-made edge joint is strong enough without them, though they can’t hurt and offer some insurance against imperfections especially near the ends of the joint. The goal is minimize the work of flattening the glued up panel.

Some authors recommend hammering the boards into alignment during glue up. With the partial exception noted below I do not like that method. Time is very limited once the edges are brought together. Using a hit or miss process while playing with clamp pressure, rushing, and hoping are not my style of woodworking, particularly when a very fast and reliable alternative is available.

At glue up, squeeze glue in the slots before spreading it on the joint edges. If you reverse the order, the coat of glue on the edge has time to start skinning over while you are fiddling with the slots. Another option is to forgo gluing the slots, but why?

Later, when you are ready to plane or sand the panel, remember to avoid sunken areas above the biscuits by giving the extra moisture and consequent wood swelling time to dissipate. Use a pinless moisture meter or just check for remaining swelling with a small rule. Anyway, before working the surface of the panel, you have to wait for the immediate area of the glue line itself to loose its swelling but this small added delay for the biscuit areas is about the only real disadvantage of using biscuits.

I do not use any of the following: special over-under clamps, cauls, pinch dogs, dowels, Dominos, splines, or incorrigibly distorted wood that does not belong in a panel.

Thin panels

What about thin panels such as drawer bottoms that will not accommodate a biscuit? Here is a straightforward method using simple shop-made blocks to control the boards near their ends that will cover most of those situations. Depending on the length of the panel, a bit of tapping in the interior of the joint is usually necessary to align the boards but this is usually easy because it is a small panel with relatively light clamp pressure.

For shops that need to make lots of panels efficiently, such as dining tables and large frame and panel doors, the Plano Glue Press is one specialized tool that looks worthwhile.

The other major aspect of reliable alignment is clamp set up, which we’ll look at next.

Good news for hand tool woodworkers has arrived from the West coast. As we all know, it is very difficult to sell high quality craft work at a price commensurate with the skills and dedication imbued by the craftsperson, particularly when a great deal of handwork is involved. Woodworkers are particularly troubled by this.

To remedy this injustice, a bill was introduced last week in the California state legislature to ensure fairness in the pricing of handmade crafts. It is the product of much research and planning among legislators and leaders in the crafts community, and all are excited that handwork artisans will finally get their fair share.

The rationale cited by those supporting the pending legislation is quite compelling. First, handcraft is an important part of American culture and must be preserved and encouraged. Advocates claim precedence for this by noting the Japanese government’s role in the preservation of traditional crafts.

Second, of economic concern, small shop artisans are not receiving a fair living wage for their efforts and talents. If you’ll excuse the metaphorical pun, the failure of the invisible hand of the market will be corrected by the fist of government justice.

Finally, of environmental concern, handwork produces a smaller carbon footprint than machine work and reduces landfill waste because the products last much longer.

Everyone wins.

Sources in the legislature say the administration of the law would be remarkably simple and work as follows. If a craft article is produced with at least 79% of the labor done by hand, on a time basis, the article must be priced to yield an effective hourly rate of at least $19.37 for the maker. (The hourly rate is still being vigorously debated.) If it cannot be sold for this price, the state will make up the difference directly to the maker if the price is set or adjusted by the maker, or to the purchaser in the form of a rebate if the maker accepts only the state-mandated price and the purchaser can demonstrate financial burden.

Each craftsperson in the program would have to be certified as a hand maker by a new state agency, tentatively titled the Handmade March to Equality Restitution (HAMMER), staffed with experts in the fields of business and craftwork. Certification will be granted after a detailed inspection of the maker’s shop along with video documentation of the maker at work, and be renewed biannually. Of course, only high-end craftspeople who are consistently offering work that is deemed to be a significant contribution to society will be accepted.

Advocates are currently trying to include special considerations for crafts sourced from indigenous peoples and other select groups.

Bids for the development of an appropriate logo for the program have already been solicited. How about something like this?

The bill was introduced in the state House by Rep. Ino Beternyu, while a companion bill in the Senate was introduced by Sen. Duwut Itelia. Though many details remain to be ironed out, the crafts community and the public at large have been reassured that the best experts are working on every imaginable detail and the roll out will be unbelievably smooth.

. . . Once again, the government is here to help, and as Milton Friedman rolls over in his grave and takes note of the date of this post, I ask: Seriously, did I have you going for just a little while?

Hand plane?

I almost always use a hand plane for the final preparation of the wood surface prior to edge gluing.

To hand plane to a final edge as efficiently as possible, I prepare the edge on a well-tuned jointer, my Hammer A3-31, or in a few cases, my cabinet saw. By doing the power tool work accurately, it can take as few as two shavings with the hand plane to finish the edge. Yet they are important shavings because they produce the truest edge and leave the best quality surface for glue adhesion, unmatched by even the best machine.

A production shop using a dedicated ripping setup with a power feeder can produce excellent edges directly from the saw but they are no better and often not as good as those produced by a skillful small shop woodworker finishing with a hand plane. For less critical work, the edge from a tuned small-shop tablesaw may suffice but for high-end work I always use a hand plane, which affords the most control of the process.

Which plane?

The photo above of the plane soles shows, from the top, a #4 smoother, a #5 bevel-down jack, a Veritas bevel-up jack with its longer infeed sole, and a 22″ #7 jointer with a 2 3/8″ wide blade. Unless you are doing only small work, it is worth having the jointer because its length will bridge valleys and level hills and so make it much easier to produce an accurate edge. You may prefer the massive 24″ #8 jointer with its 2 5/8″ blade but the #7 seems to suit my mostly medium-scale work.

It is important to realize that a very sharp blade is essential for accuracy. As the blade dulls, accuracy suffers because the edge deflects more, the shavings have to be thicker, and you have to push the plane harder with less control.

Methods

For boards up to about 2 feet long, especially if they are 1/2″ or less thick, I find that long grain shooting is the most efficient method. Close the two boards like a book and plane both edges at once so any deviation from 90° is self-correcting when the edges are later joined. Thicker boards can be planed individually, each in its book-match orientation to achieve the same benefit. Occasionally, the grain directions won’t work out but usually you are working on an edge with minimal figure runout and thus without a strong directional grain angle.

You don’t even need a shooting board because the plane sole rides on the work piece, not on the edge of the shooting board. A flat bench top would suffice. Clamp the boards so they don’t shift. Use a shooting plane or an appropriate bench plane.

Similarly, you can plane two boards at once held book-closed in the front vise of the workbench, as shown below. If you have done a good job machining the edges and align them together accurately in the vise, the combined width will give consistent support to the plane while the self-correcting geometry will ensure a good joint.

I spread my front hand widely across the plane to be able to sense any lateral tipping of the plane. I am not really using my fingers as a 90° fence but simply aim for consistency along the length of the cut. Errant tipping of the plane will introduce twist in the planed surface and an inaccurate joint.

If planing two boards at once is unmanageable due to their thicknesses or lengths, plane each edge individually. Use a deadman or a jig in the tail vise to support the lead end of a long board while the opposite end is in the front vise.

Then, one option is to plane freehand, using your front hand as a fence. Your goal is to keep the sole of the plane at a consistent angle, hopefully 90°. Check your progress with a square. If your last shaving was the full width of the edge but the square shows the edge is a bit off, do not make the correction by taking a guess and tilting the plane differently. Rather, maintain the same supposed 90° and shift the plane laterally to use the slight camber of the blade edge to take a thicker shaving from the appropriate side. Since there is likely to be some systematic error in your attempt at 90°, it may help to plane the mating board in a self-correcting orientation, if possible.

I prefer to use my shop-made plane fence to get the job done faster and more predictably. Below, the fence is attached with three hand bolts entering tapped holes in the sidewall of my Lie-Nielsen jointer plane. Lee Valley makes plane fences. This method has worked for me for 30 years.

Note that even with the fence method I still use a slight camber in the blade edge. This prevents any possibility of a concave (or supposedly straight) blade edge producing joint surfaces that kiss in the interior of the joint with hairline gaps at the outsides.

Use the method that gets the job done for you with the work at hand. With all these methods, try to finish with a full-length shaving.

Upcoming: edge joint alignment, clamp setup, and more.

Board orientation

When gluing up flatsawn boards to make a panel, is it important to alternate the growth ring orientation of the boards? The short answer is no.

In general, I suggest go for the best appearance. The reasoning usually given for alternating heart and bark faces is that the full depth of the cupping in any season is confined within each board, and thus is particularly helpful in unrestrained panels. The case usually given for orienting all the boards alike is that cupping will want to produce one large curve, which is more easily kept flat in, for example, a leg-and-apron table.

There is truth to both assertions, though unless appearance strongly dictates one or the other, I tend to favor alternating the boards. Just thinking geometrically (see the endgrain photos below), I wonder if the restraint of a presumptive large arc of like-facing boards is inordinately stressing the joints in tension on the heart face of the panel in the dry season, and vice versa in the humid season.

You can avoid the issue by using quartersawn or near-vertical riftsawn boards. With flatsawn boards, you can minimize problems by assembling the panel from equilibrated boards in a workshop in the midrange of humidity, using narrow boards, choosing species with a low T/R ratio and volumetric movement, and avoiding aberrant boards such as those with crook or substantial twist.

If you alternate the heart and bark faces of flatsawn boards, pay attention to the grain orientation if you plan on planing the glued up panel by hand or machine. Look at the glue up in the top photo. The board on the left will be planed away from the viewer – “pith side, plane with the points” – and so will the board on the right – “bark side backwards.” (Thanks to R. Bruce Hoadley for the mnemonics.) In the photo below, the endgrain growth rings are also alternated but the proper planing directions of the faces are opposing. Thus, if you alternate rings, you’ll probably also want to alternate the cathedral points.

You also have to pay attention to grain direction if heart and bark are not alternated but the choice is more apparent. The boards in the photo below are correctly oriented in this regard (plane toward the viewer).

The camber question and how to check the joint

This is one of those perpetual arguments among woodworkers. Here’s my view.

I aim for just a trace of camber (hollow), simply as a one-sided tolerance. I do not want any kissing in the central length of the joint, which might create separation tension across the joint line at the outer ends where it is most likely to open. I would be satisfied with two perfectly flat edges but that is nearly impossible to reliably observe.

With any method of planing the edges (options discussed in the next post), I want to finish with a continuous shaving to ensure there are no localized bumps or troughs in the edge. Then the best test of the joint is to set the edges against each other as in the photos below.

Move the upper board by its end. It should barely pivot at the opposite end as in the first photo below. The gap in the middle of the closed joint should be nearly invisible but you know it is there by the pivot.

In the second photo below, the pivoting shows that the boards are kissing within the length of the joint. No good.

Also, check for twist within the joint by gently trying to rock the top board across opposite-end corners of the joint. Significant twist of the joint faces against each other will produce a subtle but surprisingly detectable rocking.

Check for flatness in a few places as below, again being aware of any rocking.  Ultimately, this is far more sensitive than directly checking if the joint surface itself is square to the face of the board.

If all is well, you know you have a joint that wants to be together and is not being forced into submission by clamp pressure.

Some woodworkers like to produce a more pronounced camber to be able to clamp the joint with a single clamp across the midpoint of the length of the joint. I acknowledge that this can work but unless one has a shortage of clamps, I consider this to be an unnecessary and awkward method with several disadvantages for most work.

Also, making a substantial camber in the joint on the assumption that insufficiently equilibrated wood will dry faster at the ends is basically starting off on the wrong foot.

Upcoming: options for hand planing, and more.

From tabletops to drawer bottoms, edge-to-edge joinery is found throughout furniture making, so it is worthwhile to explore the issues involved in preparing, cutting, and gluing up these joints.

For most of the steps there are a variety of good approaches, particularly based on the size of the joint and the available tools. The outright errors usually come from injudicious wood selection or inattention to the key tolerances in the joint.

As we woodworkers can’t help but notice, edge joints that have opened up can be found everywhere. But why? After all, if the bonded glue line is really as strong as the wood itself, it should not have any more propensity to split than the adjacent wood.

One of the large drawer fronts at the factory-made red oak desk where I am typing has a small edge joint failure. A cross grain conflict with the particleboard sides is stressing the solid wood front but why is the split at the glue line?

Whether due to luck or skill, pieces that I made 25 years ago have fully intact edge joints but, again, why?

So let’s think about this fundamental joint in a short series of posts.

Keep in mind that a little split here and there usually does not affect the function of the piece. My workbench, which I’ve used for more than 30 years, has several splits in its top that don’t bother me one bit. In fact, they seem to function as built-in stress relievers that probably help maintain the remarkably consistent flatness of the top throughout the seasons.

Wood selection

It is surprising how often we see mismatched glueups in otherwise fine work. A door panel with flatsawn cathedral figure running out at a glued edge adjacent to straight rift figure looks like it came from a factory, not the shop of a craftsman. Below is a factory-made door panel that is devoid of human finesse.

It is best to match the figure at adjacent edges and generally avoid edge runout of flatsawn figure. Join rift to rift and quartered to quartered. Cathedral figure boards are best joined where there is rift figure beyond the width of the arches – ideally where the figure lines are nearly straight. Where this is not possible, try to have the figure lines flow into each other across the glue line. In this way, attention is not called to the joint line and the completed panel looks harmonious.

Below, even in this book-matched panel where the halves are necessarily mirror images of each other, the boards blend together and the joint line (indicated by the pencil) is barely detectable.

Joining a quartered-grain edge with a flatsawn-grain edge, for example, not only looks poor but the thickness of each board at the glue line will undergo different seasonal change because of the different orientation of the growth rings. This can produce a tiny but disconcerting step on the surface at the joint line. The joint is stressing itself from this conflicting movement.

In summary, join similar edges to produce visual and structural harmony.

Next: Should you alternate the growth ring orientation of flatsawn boards in a glued up panel? Also, we’ll consider the camber question.

Every once in a long while on this blog, your devoted scribe sweeps off the sawdust to see how this little blog is doing. According to the stats counter program, Heartwood has, since its inception, received about 2.5 million legitimate visits (i.e. humans, not crawlers, robots, and so forth) and more than 7 million page views.

The main message here is: thank you, dear readers. Special thanks to those who have posted comments. I will not be shy about encouraging comments – they add interest for all readers, and give me a sense of connection with woodworkers out there. I also enjoy the many woodworking questions emailed by readers, though when appropriate, I suggest present the inquiry as a comment on the blog so the information can be shared among readers.

Content on Heartwood now includes almost 160,000 words, which is the length of two to three non-fiction books, and more than 800 original photographs. Remember to check the Series Topics tab (under the header photo) for groups of posts on single topics. In the past year, I’ve posted about one-third less than usual, due to less available time, but not due to running out of things to say. I’m going to try to pick it up soon. As always, I’ll offer real-deal content “from the sawdust and shavings of my shop,” not armchair woodworking.

Blogging (by the way, I’ve never liked that word; it sounds like something you do uncontrollably when you’re ill), including woodworking blogging, is certainly not as vibrant as several years ago. Other media, particularly social media and video posting have taken their shares of the communications universe. Still, I think a good blog is a useful and enjoyable medium to share woodworking information and ideas, and interest on this one does not seem to have waned.

Thus, again, thank you, readers.

Coming up is a series on edge-to-edge joints. Happy woodworking.

A.M.D.G.

Just about all of us involved in woodworking have somewhere along the way received a pivotal benefit from encouragement, support, or an introduction to the craft from someone. If you have the opportunities, thank that person, then do the same for someone else.

Bob Flexner’s reasoned clarifications of all matters of wood finishing are among the most lucid explanations I have read, not only in the field of woodworking but anywhere. His books Understanding Wood Finishing and Flexner on Finishing are essentials for all woodworkers.

Just wondering: if you could program a laser to perfectly cut all the joinery in a work of your design, how would you feel about the finished piece? Further, how would you feel about woodworking in general and the aspects of it that are most important to you?

With all due respect to period reproduction furniture makers, it must be acknowledged that some of the most difficult steps of creating a piece of furniture have been already been done for them, not least of which is developing a coherent style within and among pieces.

Doing excellent work is never automatic. Of course, experience, good habits, muscle memory, and so forth are important, but to achieve excellent results you must bear down and concentrate each and every time. It doesn’t just happen.

Sharpness is a magic that solves so many troubles with tools and everything else in the shop. Yet I still hate to stop the workflow to sharpen.

Theodore Roosevelt said, “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” This speaks so much to us woodworkers, with our tools and wood, in our shops, perhaps bogged down by doubt. It’s worth posting in the shop.

Face it, we’re so lucky to be able to make fine things in wood.

Good job! You developed a compelling design, skillfully employed sound construction techniques, and lavished care on your baby – I mean woodworking project. And of course, you applied a finish that made her look fabulous when she – uh, it – left the shop.

Well, it’s not over because it’s a jungle out there. Consider especially that pretty finish in which you sent your furniture/accessory oeuvre out into the world.

Think about the likely use and possible abuse of the piece. Sure, a wall cabinet for art objects will not suffer as will a dining table, but will that hall table display family photos or have keys and wet umbrellas tossed onto it? Will later owners of the piece value it as much as the original owner?

A key issue is that the durability and reparability of a wood finish are generally inversely related. For example, oil-varnish mix is not very durable but is easy to repair, while a tough polyurethane film finish is more difficult to repair.

I think in many cases it comes down to which is more tolerable: dented, scarred wood or a dented, scarred thick film finish. Ultimately, water, abrasion, and ultraviolet light can break down any finish, resulting in something like the table top below. When dirt and grime get into the grain of the wood, restoration gets even more difficult.

One approach, which is gaining appeal with me in some cases, is to take it easy and apply a few coats of oil-varnish mix. I like Rockler’s Sam Maloof poly-oil because of its high solids content and amber color that is not too dark like some oil or varnish products such as Waterlox. It leaves a low-key sheen that allows one to “take pleasure in the wood surface,” as the late, great Sam said.

The car key abrasions probably will look better – and maybe even add character – in a wood surface finished with oil-varnish mix that can be easily touched up by anyone, than in the layers of a heavy film finish that will probably never be repaired by anyone.

There are always trade-offs. The point is to think it through the long term when choosing a finish.