butts are a lot stronger than I expected and I'll show you how other joints like the rabbit miter dovetail and box joint compare so you can stop that little voice in your head from asking is this strong enough oh and if you think the dovetail is the be all end all then you might be surprised previously I showed my incompetence by failing to break a simple butt joint so I headed down to the promised land crossed the border with a trunk full of joints and visited my friend suan who I like to take advantage of he helped me devise a way so I can successfully break butts what kind of butt did you think I was talking [Music] about now I know why you're all here the dovetail it's so ubiquitous that even most Furniture Savvy nonwood workers know what they are but I'll have you know if you think the dovetail is the strongest think again because of the way the angled Tails capture the pins of the mating board it prevents The Mating piece from coming apart in this direction this is a great example of what's called mechanical advantage and it's the main argument people use to promote the use of dovetails there's no doubt that dovetails add that 15th piece of flare to your furniture however duve tails are definitely the slowest joint to make out of all the joints that you'll see in this video you can either go all hand tools all power tools or somewhere in between for the five joints that I made for this video I chose to use my Lee router jig which is quite possibly the bougiest jig to come out of the '90s router can do everything crazy and this allow me to make super repeatable tight dovetails after about a fortnight of dialing The Jig in if I tried to cut these by hand it probably would have taken me an entire fortnite wait a minute so the nagging voice in the back of your mind asks can it strength match its reputation the Dov tail scored 1,88 lb of force on average the pattern of failure is the exact same on each one of my test joints you can see that on the tail the wood grain failed as if you drew a straight line from the inside of each tail which makes it suspiciously end up looking like a box joint so in this case the glue was stronger than the wood itself so if the glue is stronger then why is mechanical advantage so awesome you ask well this argument kind of goes hand in hand with the idea that glue will eventually and inevitably fail back in the day when hide glue which was made from crushed up animals was your only option yeah that glue kind of sucks and it doesn't last forever so it was a good idea to use a joint like the dovetail but now we have modern PVA glues that over the past 75 years haven't given us much reason to believe that they'll fail as long as a piece of furniture isn't left out in the rain and just to be clear we're talking timelines that far exceed our lifetimes but wait they argue that high glue should be used when you want things to come apart in the future if some nerd a 100 years from now wants to repair a drawer that I've made then good freaking luck because I ain't using High glue [Music] since the Box joint doesn't have the same geometry that can fail in a dovetail can it actually be [Music] stronger if you're in the camp that I was in who believe that wood glue is stronger than the wood itself then it seems logical that a box joint would in fact be stronger than a dovetail even though a box joint doesn't have any mechanical advantage the nice thing about box joints is that they're much easier to cut than a dovetail you only need one setup at either the table saw or the router table to achieve both sides of the joint and albe it repetitive it goes much faster and it's pretty easy to achieve a tight fit and I'm going to stop and put a big old asteris on tight fit and I'll Circle back to that in a minute because um let's just say that there's definitely an issue with many drawers that I've paid in the past oh stop your whining more important than in joinery or in woodworking in general finding a good fit can really be a challenge when it comes to finding a therapist and I'm glad to tell you about today's sponsor betterhelp better help's mission is to make therapy more affordable and more accessible and this is an important Mission because finding a therapist can be really hard especially when you're limited to the options in your area better help is a platform that makes finding a therapist easier because it's online it's remote and by filling out a few questions better help can match you to to a professional therapist in as little as a few days it's easy to sign up and get matched with a therapist and if it doesn't seem like a good fit then you can easily switch to a new therapist at no additional cost without stressing about insurance or who's in your network or anything like that regardless if you have a clinical mental health issue like depression or anxiety or if you're just a human who lives in this world who's going through a hard time therapy can give you tools to approach your life in a very different way I saw a therapist when I was a teenager and it had a big impact on the way I learn to communicate my feelings with the people closest to me so consider online therapy with better help by clicking the link in the description or visit betterhelp.com Scot wals to get 10% off your first month thanks to betterhelp for sponsoring this video the thing about the Box joint and all the joints we're going to talk about today is that they're all joints used in specific orientations when sticking two pieces of wood together like this not like this or this or even this I've covered some of the other joinery situations in other videos but all the joints in this video like the Dov tail and the Box joint are going to be used for making things like boxes wall hung cases or drawers it would be much easier for me to break each of these like I did before by putting Force Under the end and essentially just rotating it apart but when it comes to the stress that these types of joints are typically exposed to like opening a drawer it's more enlightening to just pull this joint straight apart so our welded structure that we made prevents the joints from rotating which is also why it took so much more Force to break these joints so the Box joint is it a low effort dovetail that's actually stronger nope this was basically the biggest disappointment of my entire life because before this I fully believe that box joints were actually going to be way stronger than dovetails the Box joint of unfortunately scored 754 lb but it gets worse the butt joint that you saw at the beginning it scored 133 lb how could the Box joint not only be worse than a dovetail but be so much worse than a simple butt joint well remember that asterisk from a couple of minutes ago yeah that one I think that the fit had something to do with it I make my box joints reasonably tight but not so tight that I can't simply push them together what I think happened is that most of the glue was pushed out
