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Bob D[_2_] Bob D[_2_] is offline
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Default A waste of time?

On Sunday, December 20, 2020 at 8:58:19 AM UTC-6, wrote:
On Saturday, December 19, 2020 at 10:46:26 PM UTC-5, Unquestionably Confused wrote:
On 12/19/2020 4:41 PM, Bob D wrote:
On Friday, December 18, 2020 at 11:11:02 PM UTC-6, wrote:
Anyway, despite a heck of a lot of long-grain surface to glue, I decided to use dowels to fasten the two pieces together. I figured that - if nothing else - they would make the alignment easy and nothing would slip when I put the clamps on. It worked well, but were the dowels a waste of time, at least for strength?

For me, its not a question of time. It's about stress. I get stressed if I am doing a glue-up that requires jostleing long or heavy pieces. Dowels or dominoes or (pick your own) greatly eliminate stress, especially if you need to use clamps to pull it together in alignment. You don't have to be concerned about the joint slipping around as you try to align it. I like doing things without stress. I'm not going to engage in an argument about strength.

Bob

Depending upon the project, tapping a couple of brads in perpendicular
to the mating surface on one board and then snipping off the head
leaving just a bit of the brad proud will also do the trick.

Spread the glue, position the pieces and slowly clamp them together.
They will not shift.

So first, that sounds pretty clever. But that only stops the pieces from shifting from whatever position they were in when they first "mate". The dowels also help the pieces mate in the proper alignment, a boon for a guy like me who is low on experience.


I agree. The brads will hold for some cases but they do not guarantee initial alignment, especially if the glue up is anything but flat on the table. A lot of my joints are done with simple butt joints and dominoes (no rebates or dados). That's just my simple style for things that really don't show.

Bob