Your basic corner-joint

Who doesn't like a good joint?

[ soundtrack : ‘Wolf Hunt’ - Vladimir Vysotsky ]

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Time is a strangely illusive phenomenon: As far as this substack is concerned, I’ve just cut the joinery for the winter-windows I’ve been working on — I’ll show you the pictures to prove it! But as far as I’m concerned, this is Easter week and although I’ll turn the lights on in the shop most days, I probably won’t do much. I’m mostly trying to come to grips with Mahler’s second symphony and working my way through Solzhenitsyn’s ‘August 1914’ and its sequel in the series of novels ‘The Red Wheel’. 110 years ago already? How time flies …

Yes, this is how highbrow I am. As if a woodworker should not listen to classical music or read serious literature? Am I not my father’s son?

Here’s a story for you: It was during the first ‘get-to-know-each-other-week’ in high-school / grammar school / gymnasium that I decided: Enough! with keeping my light under a bushel. Our form master asked the class “What do you look for in a new friend?“ and had us write our answers anonymously on small pieces of paper that, when collected, he would tally up on the blackboard. Unsurprisingly, ‘kindness’ got a lot of votes. Who doesn’t love a fictive, fuckin’ rainbow? My contention that ‘intelligence’ might be an attractive attribute was met with a collective howl of indignation (We’re in Norway, remember?) Our Iranian expat classmate, later life-long state-subsidized professional malcontent, had no hesitation in swiveling around, shrieking: “Who wrote that!? Who wrote that!?“ I looked her in the eye, raised my hand and said “I wrote that.” It was my first encounter with the ideologically possessed. This was in 1987. Things have become much worse since then. Still, the point holds: Raise your hand and firmly say NO to hysterical nonsense.

Reading, next: Vasily Grossman — ‘Life and Fate’. I’m trying to find out how it all went so terribly wrong for our paranoid and thuggish russian neighbours — may God have mercy on their brutalized souls!

Don’t hold your breath.

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Some woodworking, then?

In previous installments I’ve talked about the basics; from stock prep, via mortising and cutting tenons to glueing up frames. Bread & butter work for a woodworker — or “enough for salt in the porridge” as we would say on our side of the North Sea. Today I would like to show you the (in my opinion) easiest and most versatile corner joint. Here’s what it looks like:

I guess you could describe it as an open mortise & tenon corner joint with a mitered (inside) section. There are a surprising number of ways to join two sticks at an angle; this is one of the easier ones to understand. The width of the sticks is divided into two parts: The lion’s share of it is used to accommodate the mortise and tenon (the structural joint), while a smaller, inside part is set aside for a profile, a rebate for a pane of glass or a dado for a floating panel. The two sections of the width are separate; they do not interfere with each other.

9 + 39 = 48 mm (i.e. 2” planed) — traditional woodworking sizes are not randomly arrived at :-)

I cut all the joinery with the sticks still ‘in the square’. This makes for easier marking and machining. The profile and rebate can wait. These windows, or glass-frames as I prefer to call them, each have a pair of horizontal muntins or glazing bars. They need their own tiny joinery; a small tenon — more of a locating nub — and mitered shoulders just like the bigger, proper corner joints. Let me quickly show you how I made them. First: muntin sticks dimensioned and cut to final length.

Then: stiles marked for mortise and mitered shoulders.

A small mortise (6 x 12 mm) for the muntin tenon.

I clamped in place a piece of scrap as a stopper-block. Fences and stopper-blocks means you don’t have to eyeball it each time; you gain accuracy and repeatability — and don’t have to rely on markings.

The same applies when cutting the mitered shoulders on each side of the mortise — clamping a piece of wood in the right spot saves a lot of hassle.

Depth-stop on mitre saw engaged!

Just turn the stick around to cut the other shoulder.

Now you should have a collection of stiles looking like this …

… and all you need to do is to get rid of the surplus. A chisel will do nicely.

Next: cutting tenons on the ends of the muntins. I’ve shown in previous posts how I use the spindle moulder to cut tenons, so I’ll just rattle through the pictures, trusting you to follow the progression.

It’s a piece of piss, really …

The length of the muntins should be the same as the rails — from shoulder to shoulder.

Without becoming unduly lewd, the basic principle is as old as time itself.

And before you know it, your workshop has spawned a multitude of mating parts.

Joinery: check!

Next: routing rebates and profiles

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