Dan Shapiro

I’m back, typing slowly with a giant bandage on my finger. If you’re curious (and haven’t had anything to eat recently), check the extended entry for the very gory details on exactly what happened. I recommend against it.
So I spent a lot of time investigating joinery methods for the coffee table and forthcoming dining room table. The challenge is basically this: what is the best way to glue up multiple hardwood boards to make a nice flat tabletop?
Here’s what’s at stake:
Strength: Elmer’s white glue is not what you want here. Solid, strong joinery is easy and necessary.
Ease of use: How long it takes you to work out enough kinks that you can do it reliably, and how fast it is once you’ve got the knack of it.
Cost: Both up-front (e.g. biscuit joiner) and recurring (e.g. biscuits).
Invisibility: You want the seams between the boards to be invisible; if you do a good job of matching grains (and/or buy lumber that’s well matched from the same tree) it can look like one big beautiful panel.
Probability of causing you to bash open your fingernail: I just made this one up.
Alignment: Some systems tend to pull your boards into perfect alignment. Some tend to produce lovely walnut ant stairs. This is the biggest concern of them all: if your alignment is off, you get to spend hours sanding, are likely to wind up with a wavy surface, and/or have to knock down the top and bottom until it’s flat again, making the slab thinner than you wanted (and paid for).
And now the contenders:
Straight up glue joints
As you may know, wood glue joints are typically stronger than the wood itself. So why bother strengthening the joint? Isn’t plain glue strong enough? My theory is: well, yes and no. Think about your KD8% S2S1E lumber for a moment back in its original state–as a piece of a tree. Now think about where the edges of that board are–they’re either near the very center or the very edge… the two places where the wood is weakest. Cutting lumber is like trimming a turkey, and you some times get bits of bone in the meat and vice versa. On top of that, the edge is where the most radical moisture changes occur, further weakening the board. Net-net is that the weakest part of the board is near the edge. So while the glue joint is plenty strong, you’ll find that the weakest part is immedately adjacent to the glue joint–you’ll notice the wood fracture a few millimeters from the glue line. While it’s nice to know your glue didn’t fail, it’s small compensation when your table is sitting on the floor in two pieces. So the point of a strong joint isn’t actually the joint, but rather the areas near the joint.
In any case, the strength of a glue-only joint should be sufficient, even if you don’t get any additional reinforcement for the surrounding areas. If you do it right, cost is minimal, and it’s invisible as anything.
Time-wise, you’re going to spend longer on the glueup phase running around trying to get everything aligned. Which brings us to the biggest problem: it’s hard to get a bunch of slightly-curved boards lined up right, producing the antstep scenario. It took me many, many tries to get alignment within an eighth of an inch, and that’s bad. It cost me lots of extra time sanding and my surface was wavier and thinner as a result. Verdict: ok, but go for something better.
Biscuits
Aka plates, aka lamellos. Strength-wise, biscuits are great. They’re highly engineer compressed disclets of wood fibery goodness specifically designed to strengthen your joints. Plus, when you put them in, they swell up (insert bad joke about biscuits making people swell up too) to lock everything in place, which is cool.
As far as ease-of-use, they’re not bad, as long as you use one simple trick. Instead of using the fence that comes with the jointer, set the board and the jointer down on a flat surface and they will naturally be parallel. This gives much better results than the fence, which is tricky to get perfectly square.
Invisibility is usually good, but you can wind up having the biscuit swell such that its outline shows in the surface of the wood. Sanding will fix this of course.
Biscuit joiners and biscuits are a nontrivial cost; that’s a major downside for many people considering them.
Alignment is the trick here. I found that the swelling effect of the biscuits can cause your boards to go pretty significantly out of alignment if you don’t act fast during glueup. Rushing and woodworking not being my favorite combination, I’m saving biscuits for picture frames and other tasks that require them.
Dowels
Strength: like biscuits, A+. Good little hardwood chunks with the grain running perpendicular to the board’s grain. Some small degree of swelling too, which adds strength.
Ease of use: With the right jig, superfast snap.
Cost: Depends on you jig, but can be very high. Be sure to use dowels designed for the purpose; the ridged edges allow glue to squeeze out.
Invisibility: Great.
Alignment: Wow, amazing. With the studly jig I used (the aforementioned Very Expensive one, borrowed from a friend) it was dead on every time with virtually no effort. I’m a convert on this point, the most important one to me.
Splines:
Forget this, my finger hurts. Search the archive for my thoughts on splines.
The bottom line: The Dowelmax rocked my world. Save the money; don’t buy a biscuit joiner. Instead buy the good stuff. It’s awesome, it’s easy, it’s effective. You’ll thank me for it.

(OUCH MY HAND HURTS!
Major medical gross-out alert. Skip if you’re squeamish… for a very broad definition of squeamish.
I smashed my hand two weeks ago and lacerated the nail bed. It happened when a crescent wrench slipped off the clamp I was tightening and my hand slammed into another nearby clamp. My internist gave me painkillers and told me it’d resolve itself. After a few days the tip of my finger was swollen to twice it’s normal size, so I went back in. He said it was infected and prescribed an antibiotic, and then referred me to a hand surgeon.
The hand surgeon said that it wasn’t infected, but he had to relieve the giant swelling sac of blood that was causing the tip of my finger to swell up. He injected several pints of anesthetic into the base of the finger–more than I possibly thought could have fit in there–and then mooshed around the bubble of fiery-hot pain until some of it had squirted back out the needle hole and the rest had started to go to work on the finger in question. Then he sent me in for xrays, which were thankfully negative.
He proceeded to, without warning, stab a sharp forceps type thingy under the nail, causing a gusher of blood (and who knows, probably some of that leftover anesthetic that mooshed its way up the finger) all over the table. My fingertip deflated as I watched in horror. The, again without warning, he grabbed the nail with his cute little pliers and pulled it off, ripping it out from under the cuticle.
He played around with it for a bit, and I kept prompting him to tell me what he was doing. Why did you pull the nail? So I could stitch the nailbed. Why did you have to do that? Otherwise the nail will grow back in looking all nasty; the nailbed is the template for the nail. Do I have to get the stitches out? No, they’re dissolving.
OK, he says, now I’m going to put the nail back on. Hm, where is it? He lost it. I had no idea we’d be needing it again or I would have offered to hold on to it for him. After a minute of searching (including, I am not making this up, LOOKING ON THE FLOOR FOR IT) he noticed it stuck to a piece of used bloody gauze. He cleaned it off, shoved it back in the finger, wiggled it around a little, and started sewing it back on. Let me tell you, needle doesn’t go through nail easily, and my whole hand was jerking around. Five giant loopy sutures right through the nail and the cuticle. I stared in horror.
He wrapped up my finger and told me to “change the dressing in a few days”. My terrific wife (who was with me through the whole ordeal) asked him if he was going to give us some gauze or something to change it with and he looked at her like she was from mars. Evidently they carry all the goods at drugstores, but I didn’t know that. I asked him what symptoms should cause me to
call him back and he told me what to look for. Then he scheduled an appointment to take the stitches out.
Well, the dressing appeared welded to the wound, and it took me till Sunday to figure out how to change the thing (five days). When I did (soaked in it warm water for two hours) it had nasty yellow globules all around the edge. So I called around to try to find a more patient-friendly hand surgeon, failed, and went to see him at 2:00 today.
He immediately whipped out a suture/desuture kit and I had to stop him to find out what he had planned. Long story short (“Too late!”) he pulled the stitches, removed the nail, washed the nailbed off, SWABBED IT DRY, and shoved the nail back in. Do you know how much it hurts to have someone roughly swab the bed of your exposed fingernail with a gauze pad? I let out a yell and literally yanked my hand away from him. Fortunately, he did not misplace any significant detached segments of my anatomy this time.
When I emerged from the office the nurses had a sticker and a lollipop for me, plus they were laughing their asses off. I am wearing my sticker now, but holy **** my hand is in pain.
If anyone gets this far, I hope this has served some useful purpose… maybe “at least my day wasn’t as bad as Dan’s is turning out to be”.
Ouch,
–dan)

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