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Adam Finger joint preferences
July 17th, 2005 06:49 AM
July 17, 2005 Finger joint preferences


I'm using 1/4 inch finger joints, due to the small nature of my boxes and the need to keep proper design balance. A general rule of thumb is finger joint width equaling box wall thickness.

Should I make larger boxes I may consider the larger "fingers".

But, at a certain size (much over ½ inch) I would consider replacing the finger joints with dovetail joints. Dovetails can be routed at impressive speeds, look even cooler than large finger joints and that big a finger could probably not suffer by using a self-locking dovetail joint.

The finger or box joint arrived on the scene by manufacturers wanting to get around the complexities and high cost of producing dovetail jointed boxes. Dovetails still reign supreme in applications like drawer sides.

For really large visible pins and tails (through dovetails, 1 inch and over), I hand cut my dovetails.

At present, I'm using the two outside 1/8 inch wide blades of my old stacked dado 8 inch set for forming the 1/4 inch box fingers.

Unfortunately, they're combination-cut blades require pieces of waste stock be used to avoid tear-out on the main pieces.

I am eventually going to switch over to the 6 inch "satin-cut" dado blades. Definitely before I attempt any Cedar finger-jointed boxes.

The only other thing I do is construct the whole box and THEN carefully cut off the top of the box with a thin-kerf, fine-toothed blade. The two halves line up perfectly (very important for anyone leaning toward OCD).

[Tell'm about the brass alignment pins you've used in your honing stone boxes!]
[Maybe later, in another thread.]
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