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Nowadays, it is possible to build almost any piece of furniture without being able to tell a dovetail from a bridle joint or ever touching a chisel. But if you want to work wood or if your interest is in repairing, restoring or reproducing traditional furniture, you will need to know the purposes of cut joints and the way to make them.

Cutting traditional joints is work for hand tools; the right ones, correctly used without rushing.
The tools you need

The tools required are few and mostly unsophisticated. Jigs, which can save time setting out when the same joint must be repeated several times, are available. But they are limited in the size of work-piece that can be accommodated and require much the same level of concentration in use as tools used freehand. You can also make your own jigs.

A basic setting and marking out kit consists of a try-square (for angles other than 90° use a sliding bevel), a pencil and a marking knife, a straight-edged rule (preferably stainless steel) and marking and mortise gauges.

The four basic tools for making joints are a saw, a chisel, a mallet and a plane. You do not need to use all four for every joint. For some joints you need only use a saw - usually a tenon saw, but fine cabinet work may call for a dovetail saw, which is similar but smaller. Even finer work - on small drawers and boxes or on models, say - may need a gents saw, which has a straight handle and very small teeth. A coping saw is useful for cutting out the waste between dovetails and pins.

Many joints require chisels - the most satisfactory type for general use is the bevel-edge chisel, in widths from 6.5mm upwards. A block or smoothing plane is needed to level the surfaces of the joint after it has been assembled. Rebate, moulding and plough planes could also be used to make the work easier. A router makes a better job of smoothing and levelling the bottom of housings than a chisel.

Joints
The naming of joints is not always consistent: some are called one thing by one craftsman and something else by another. Where alternative names are common, we have given both.

A joint is a fixed junction between two or more pieces of wood: it should not be flexible. The simplest is the butt joint, in which two surfaces are brought together in the same plane and joined with glue or mechanical devices, such as pins or screws, or a combination of both. A dowelled joint is basically a butt joint secured with glued-in wooden pins - dowels.

Joints are very important in wood working. You should know how to replace a wooden window sill and how to finish and stain wood.

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