Which Joinery Technique is the Strongest? ft. Kreg & Festool Domino | Hand Tool Shootout

hey guys welcome to woodwork life well it looks like it's time for another hand tool shootout and today we look at who is the king of the butt joint and for those not familiar a butt joint is a perpendicular drunk we have the long grain of the wood and then a perpendicular piece of wood going into that the reason that you need to look at types of joinery for this is that glue is not actually going to hold this joint together it'll all just suck into the end grain here and you won't actually get any sort of joint so there's a lot of different tools and techniques for getting a proper butt joint the most primitive or I guess the longest-running type of joint that's been used is the hand cut mortise and tenon so I've got two iterations that the hand cut mortise and tenon and a machine cut mortise and tenon to look at there's also been some other cool new technologies come out lately like the Festool Domino which is actually a floating tenon joint technically and the pocket hole joint or Craig joint as a lot of people call it we're to be doing that using the Craig k5 we're also just for kind of shits and giggles gonna be looking at doing a biscuit joint some people use these for cabinetry and things like that but it's not actually a structural joint but I'll kind of show you how that breaks down so we're gonna look at all of those where you started by putting all these joints together so let's check out first how long these joints take to put together then we'll kind of look at the fit and finish and repeatability of these joints then we'll look at how strong each of these joints actually stand up to forces and then at the end we'll sort of break all of it down to look at the total cost of ownership and the total sort of cost of investment into doing any of these joints on either a hobbyist or a production capability so thanks for watching today and let's go ahead and jump right into it now we don't cut these super often so I'm not like some franc clouds that's gonna knock these out in three minutes but I just used the technique I know that's gonna give me a reliable and consistent output because the one thing you can slow down is cutting these more than once so with these I made sure to mark all my edges and then move carefully towards them with the paul sellers technique and then trim up my tenon with chisels to fine tune the fit now my camera did stop recording at 20 minutes but I did have a stopwatch going as a backup I'm by no means a pro with the Domino I've only been using it for probably about a month so I'm sure you could trim a few seconds off of this but the things pretty easy to use in pretty self-explanatory I ended up knocking these out in just over a minute and they fit perfectly so this is the technique I'm most familiar with and this is what I usually use I choose a router to plow a mortise and then I'll use my dado stack to sneak up on a perfectly snug fit for the tenon now come right out and say it I have no hope for these joints biscuits don't actually add any strength to a joint they're really just designed for alignment but I wanted to see if they enforced a butt joint at all I've put together my share of shop furniture and simple household projects with the Kreg jig and I've seen all kinds of production shops that use them for a lot of different tasks and I dare you to find a piece of furniture in a furniture showroom that doesn't have some sort of pocket hole joinery so I really was interested in seeing how these would end up in this shootout all right so now that we got these all cleaned up I'm interested in cleaning up these faces and seeing how the finished surface actually looks I'm interested in how invisible the joint is or how tight it is now some of that's gonna be dependent on me and how well I cut these joints but that comes down to kind of the repeatability of the joint and then also how many usable faces each joint has and that really should only affect the Kreg jig but we'll check that out and see how that all came together so let's get these cleaned up [Music] all right so after finishing all these up there's not really much in it as far as finished face so a side goes the biscuit joint the Domino and the Kreg jig a side definitely looked the best but that's really just down to like execution the only real problem with the hand cut and the machine cut joints were the chip out on the edges but that could easily be solved with scoring I was just trying to give them the best opportunity possible to compete with the other guys by just you know going straight to the tools your arm as far as the B side goes or the you know the non outside finish side again the Domino and the biscuit joint look almost perfect the Kreg jig looks great besides these plugs but with some of the new craig plug cutters you could fix that pretty easily and the B side of the machine cut joint looks exactly the same as the a side joint and that's it comes down to machine accuracy but you can see in the hand cut joint here how there's just a little bit of inaccuracy because it's done by hand so maybe on that shoulder I didn't go down exactly at 90 degrees or I wasn't exactly in the same plane as the other side of the joint again that comes down to skill time and execution so with a little bit more time you could definitely account for that but that's one kind of consideration um one thing I didn't think about when I was going into this is the fact that obviously a hand cut tenon is going to complicate your measurements as well so that comes in kind of repeatability so I need to account for the length of the tenon that I plan to cut with the length of the stock that I'm prepping for those stretchers or whatever I'm connecting with mortise and Tenon's so that's another thing to consider and when I'm looking at the strength of these joints that sometime definitely gonna have to take into account since that extra leverage is going to give more leverage to actually break that joint so now that we've seen the fit sides I probably would say the Domino is the highest quality look on the finish close by the biscuit which I guess wasn't really expected but I guess not really that much of a surprise and then everything else kind of in the same league with one usable face and then you know just some complexities with the hand cut and machine cut joint so now we've looked at all these as far as finished quality let's take them to my little rig and check out and see how strong they actually are so the to cut mortise and Tenon's were a little bit surprising I think this had more to do with the weakness of the wood this was an old-growth Douglas fir which is more of a softwood than a hardwood and it was really splintery to work with so it probably was just splintering away and just cracking it was the failing of the wood more than the failing of the joint these tests were hardly scientific because I didn't repeat them multiple times but I did make sure to be consistent I put a nail six inches down the board and applied the pressure directly next to that nail so that I get a consistent measurement with that mechanical advantage of the lever against the joint so the first joint failed 118 pounds that was the hand-cut joint so now we'll move on to the machine cut joint again this is perfectly snug fit and no reason suspected to fail so applying pressure this one took 170 pounds to break the glue joint and this didn't splinter the same way that the hand cut one so again at least me to believe this is more to do with the wood than the actual joinery so I may need to repeat this test again I mean it's already failed now but okay let's see when this one fails this is the biscuit joint and it's totally failed as you can see I mean it's just basically a butt joint so all the glue is sucked into the end grain here the biscuit joint actually failed when I put the mail in so I don't even have to put any pressure on it but thirty-eight pounds is pretty weak I wouldn't suspect the biscuit joint to actually have that much strength the next joint was the Domino joint and I think the advantage here was that the Domino's are actually hardwood it was about the same amount of wood but with the rounded edges and the hardwood floating Tenon's it's not surprising that was a little bit stronger than a softwood tenant into a softwood mortise the final joint was the pocket hole joint this was done with a Kreg jig it took about 120 pounds to break this joint which sounds kind of weak so does 118 earlier but honestly if you have four of these holding up a chair it should be strong enough for most people to sit in that's a four hundred and eighty pound total load all right so let's break this down I'm gonna have a table here on the screen somewhere so pause it if you really want to break down into any the details but I'm gonna go over some of the highlights here so one of the big things I did with this chart is I looked at single unit costs are sort of like hobbyist cost and this is making eight joints versus production costs and that was making a hundred joints and one thing that really stands out is look at the Domino and the Kreg jig on that the unit costs when you're doing one unit it doesn't go up that much when you scale it up to a hundred units it still stays relatively close to the initial investment you have in the tool and what that means is that producing one hundred a thousand ten thousand units it's really not gonna cost you that much labor and that's what really hurts you so what I did is I took how much time it took to make one joint and then I multiplied that by eight and then by then by a hundred and I took that and divided how many hours that was and multiply that by fifteen dollars an hour for just like a minimum wage type employee running in a shop and that really can kind of show you your ROI or your break-even point so that's where really if are trying to use these more professionally than just like as a hobbyist if you're a hobbyist the one thing that kind of might stand out to you is look at the hand-cut mortise and tenon joint so making one of those really you're just in it for the price of the tools and a little bit of time but when you start making fifty a hundred those joints the cost can really start adding up which is the time that you're gonna invest in making those projects so if you just enjoy making something every now and again maybe just having a saw a chisel and a square might be good enough to get you started you can also look at the machine cut joints and see how those kind of scale similarly but a little bit faster a little bit slower rate so if you are just you know going to be an Etsy producer making a couple projects here or there maybe that might work out for you I have all of the affiliate links for kind of some of the recommended tools for each of those categories down below in the description so do check that out if you plan on buying this stuff it can help me out just a little bit I've learned a lot really doing this shootout and really doing all these shootouts so if you enjoyed this shoot please drop me a like down below and check out in the cards at the end I've got a playlist with the rest of the shoots I've done just kind of see what else I've looked at also if you're a subscriber or if you just like cool shirts you can see this shirt I'm wearing throughout this video this is the new wood work life t-shirt on the front it's got keep your tools sharp and keep your minds sharper or as my wife says keep your plane sharp and keep your brains sharper I guess it works either way it's got this on the front and then on the back it's got the wood work life logo I'm gonna be bringing these two work bench con in February in Atlanta so if you're there just shout out to me keep your tools sharp keep your mind sharp err I'll get you a free t-shirt if I have any left and if you're not gonna be at work wrench con I am gonna be putting these on my website for a pre-order I'm just looking to get 20 bucks out of these that is shipping included to the continental US I'm having these printed they're high-quality polyblend t-shirts screen printed locally here in st. Louis by a by a guy that's doing the work for me just if you enjoy them or if you think you might want to wear one of these go check that out thanks for watching today and I guess remember to keep your tools sharp and keep your mind sharper have a good one guys you

Channel: Wood.Work.LIFE.

Views: 532,261

Rating: 4.7914348 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, wood, building, hand tools, hand tool shootout, kreg, pocket hole, festool, domino, handtool, shoot out, kreg k5, mortise and tenon, biscuit joiner, how strong is a pocket hole, how strong is a mortise and tenon, which is stronger, butt joint, joinery, wood joinery, mortise, tenon, domino joinery, kreg jig, handtools, hand tool, joiner, chisel, pocket hole jig, joints, pocket holes, tool review, bosch colt router, how to, df 500, best hand tools, diy drawer, cabinetry, diy

Id: xfjg3eQxlnw

Length: 13min 11sec (791 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 21 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Interesting I wonder how typical dowel joinery would have compared to the domino.