5 Brilliant Joinery Tips

Are you taking up a woodworking project by yourself at home? How well do you understand joinery? This is going to be fun when you understand basic tips in wood joinery that will help you come up with the best quality. In this article, I will be giving you the best joinery techniques that you can use in your project.

Practice on small pieces

When you have a project you are going to work on it, it is necessary that you make a duplicate of the project using small test pieces, cut all the necessary joints to resemble the ones in the real project and join them just to see if it will work, what you can change and what approach you can use that is the best. You can try several times to make sure you reach accuracy. Also, when you try out with small pieces, you will be able to get more new ideas that you can use to make your project better just before you start.

Instead of using a tape measure, use marks

When trying to find the exact places to cut for you to make joints, you should use a pencil to mark the points and not a tape measure; it might just give you inaccurate measurements. Hold a piece that has been cut against the full piece and mark where you need to cut for you to make a joint, this gives you a perfect joint to join.

Have a multi-purpose hammer

In joinery, you will need to hold your joints together with nails, although this is dependant on the kind of a project, for this reason, you will need a hammer to drive in nails. A multi-purpose hammer will be better for your work, the curved claws of the harmer will help you to get, out the nails if you feel you have not done it right rather than wasting time to check another tool to do the work.

Write measurements down

One thing that can make joinery hard for you is forgetting measurements every time, forgetting the length of your pieces can cost you a lot of materials having to abandon the materials you have cut to go for the new ones. The trick here is to write every measurement you cut somewhere you can easily access, for instance, you can write the measurements on a tape and stick it to the commonly used tool like the harmer or any other just as long as you can check easily.

Use power trim guns on delicate projects

Nailing your project using a harmer is a very good method; however, there are some projects which will need you to use power trim guns, to achieve what you want. Harmers exert a lot of pressure and you can miss hence damaging your piece of work. Trim guns are accurate, much faster and very accurate to use. There are very many sizes of power trim guns, you can choose whichever you think will fit most of your projects.

Tap the areas of the joints lightly with your harmer

This is very common with many professional woodworkers. Sometimes the joints might have not just bonded well depending on what you have used in joinery. Whether you are using nails, glue or any other technique, tapping will help you to tighten the joints better. When you are doing this you should be very careful not to damage your piece of work, first, make sure that you are tapping very gently, this is because, wood is made up of fibers and if you tap so hard, the fibers can break hence weakening the wood making it easy to break, also make sure that you are not tapping with the edge of a hammer, tap with the flat surface of the harmer to make sure that the pressure is evenly distributed.