The Humble Butt Joint
In my recent challenge, I and many of you built a basic box using butt joint construction. I believe that the butt joint is a fantastic place to start building basic woodworking skills. Youtube often dazzles us with impressive projects and overshadows the basic skills we should really be building. Young and beginner woodworkers in particular may find themselves sinking time into complicated joinery that they do not need to get started.
The butt joint has been used for hundreds of years, but power tools and computer controlled equipment have unfortunately meant that it has fallen out of favour. I built my small box to prove the point that using a butt joint can produce a beautiful and elegant result owing to its simplicity as well as proving that we don’t always need to make a project using dovetail joints or even box joints.
The butt joint can be held together with just glue and nails. We need to be teaching the next generation of young woodworkers - boys and girls in their teens - when starting out in a woodwork/cabinetry career that basic skills are the way forward.
If you understand hand tool basics as well as those of wood movement bundled in with some basic woodworking joints, then you are on the path to a very successful career. Taking a look at woodworking in the early 1900s, we can clearly see that most chair construction also made use of this humble joint., held together with glue and wooden dowels if needed.
Indeed if we go back even further to the 1800s, and take a look at the construction of a tall case clock, for example, then this very joint was used yet again, glued and nailed with hand-cut nails, and in some cases, veneered over to disguise the joints.
I think we need to take a step back in time and teach these simple basic to beginner woodworkers, which will allow them to build beautiful furniture without having to rely on biscuit jointers, or even Domino jointers, instead using skills that have been shared for thousands of years. Doing so we can hopefully preserve our teaching of this craftsmanship for many more years to come.
Simple but attractive boxes constructed with Butt Joints
Did you create a box as part of the challenge, or something else with a butt joint? Share in the comments!