1. Types of Joints

There are many wood joints available to make, joints are used to build strength into products. The

joints below are the joints that are commonly used in schools. Note only glue is used to join these

joints together.

1. Butt joint

A very simple joint but it is also very weak. They tend to be used for making picture frames, corner

pieces and nails are often used to strengthen the joint.

2. Mitre joint

Mitre joints are often used to produce the corners of picture frames and boxes. The mitre needs to be

cut at a 45 degree angle, this is often used with a mitre saw that can cut at many different angles.

3. Halving joint (Half Lap Joint)

There are many versions of the halving joint but they all involve removing half of the wood from each

piece using a saw or a chisel. This joint is often strengthened with dowel.

4. Mortise and Tenon

This is a very strong joint. The joint is split into two parts one part is the tenon named after the

tenon saw, the other part is the mortise which is named after the mortise chisel. Within industry the

joint is milled using a milling machine.

5. Dowel joint

This joint is quite easy to make, it consists of drilling accurate holes in both sections of wood and

joining them with dowel pegs. Within in industry this is often used to construct flat pack furniture.

6. Lap joint

This joint is only slightly stronger than the butt joint. There is however a bigger surface area for

gluing. This joint is often strengthened with nails.

7.Housing joints

This is just a simple slot cut into one piece of wood to increase the glue area. This is often done with

a router and works very well in MDF.

8.Finger joint

This is one of the strongest joint, the only joint that is stronger is the dovetail joint. The finger

joint can be made using a jig on a table saw or a router table. It has a lot of surface area to glue together and looks very good once assembled.

9. Dovetail Joint

A special jig needs to be used for the creation of the multiple dovetail joint. This joint is by far the strongest joint of all and requires a certain amount of skills to master. The single dovetail joint is a lot simpler to do and can be achieved using basic hand tools. The single dovetail still can sustain a lot of pressure making it a favorite in log cabin construction.

Here you will find 50 different wood joints that could be used.