drawboring - no clamps required
^{a wortheffort technique article by shawn graham}

wooodworkers:

If you have a differing opinion or corrections on this article and I will copy/paste your exact words here, including any spelling errors. Just e-mail them to me.

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Drawboring is a joinery technique I think every home artisan should learn. It used to be standard in most mortise and tenon joints because glues sucked. Our modern stuff is good enough that most mortise and tenon joints will not fail, at least in our lifetimes. The added steps this technique requires increases the time investment in any project hence most commercial applications have stopped using it.

There are other aspects to this joint that make it extremely popular with me. Someone who is cheap, not very dextrous and impatient. Namely I can eliminate all clamping in most projects so that purchase is put off and all it requires is some scrap I'd likely throw away any ways. Plus I don't have to wait for the glue to dry. While I normally use glue all over the joint in this example I didn't and it holds brilliantly.

Bonus at the end of the episode is my trick for filling the gaps in doweled joints or dowel plugs. I've been doing this so long I'm afraid I don't remember where I learned it.

Below is the simple FLASH animation I created for the video. You are free to use it on your site as long as you give me a link back. You can download it here by using your 'save as' function. Please don't link directly to it, despite it's small file size I do not have a whole lot of bandwidth with my hosting plan.

Episode notes:

I learned this technique from Christopher Schwarz, formally of Popular Woodworking thru his Workbench book and website. here is a YouTube video of him doing this exact procedure during a Popular Woodworking open house.