How to Digitally Design Joinery for Better Assembly
If you’re making two pieces meant to fit together, you’ll want to know these basic best practices for designing joinery in CAD programs.
joinery
50 Digital Wood Joints Poster
Print out this poster of 50 digital wood joints, compiled by Jochen Gross and laid out by Meredith Scheff-King.
Cutting Dovetail Joints by Hand
Dovetail joints are an ancient way of mating two pieces of wood at a corner. Often used in cabinet-making, the dovetail joint is both extremely strong, and aesthetically pleasing.
Workshop: Len Cullum in Seattle, Washington
Making Connections By Laura Cochrane Photography by John Keatley Neatly lined up along the walls of Len Cullum’s 1,500-square-foot north Seattle workshop are handmade Japanese chisels, saws, and planes. In a building rumored to have once been a shark oil processing plant, Cullum, 46, creates Japanese-style shoji doors and windows, garden structures, and furniture. Cullum constructs […]
Cool CNC Lounge Chair Design
To me, Gustav Düsing’s Chair 23D seems like a notable landmark in the development of what Bruce Sterling famously referred to, back in MAKE Vol 11, as “router aesthetics.”
CNC Panel Joinery Notebook
A collection of clever ways of slotting flat stock together for CNC, laser cutters, and conventional material cutting and joining.
What’s this kind of joint called?
I have built a couple of laser-cut and CNC-routed kits, recently, that use this clever arrangement of tabs, slots, and a couple bits of cheap hardware to securely butt one panel against another at a right angle. One panel has a pair of rectangular ports with a round hole in between, and the other has a matching pair of tabs with a smaller T-shaped slot between. In use, the ports receive the tabs and a screw passes through the round hole and along the upright of the T to mate with a square nut captured in the arms of the T. There are many possible variations and the technique has lots to recommend it from a manufacturer’s standpoint.
