Biscuit Joiner: Reinforce Miters

When you're putting miters together, one of the problems we run up against is all that end grain, all that end grain, very, very porous, not a very strong joint, whether we're doing miters like that or miters like that same issue. A biscuit joiner provides a really, really good way to reinforce those miters, but there's some stuff that we gotta keep in mind. So let's do this application first. You're making a picture frame of some kind. We wanna reinforce that miter.

This is pretty straightforward. I am going to mark where I'm gonna cut the biscuit joint. One of the things we wanna do is make sure that the slot we're about to cut isn't gonna blow out the corner. So we can do that by simply putting a biscuit on here, seeing where the center of it is and making sure that that's where we cut the joint. For this application.

I would use the biscuit joiner with the fence set to the center of three quarter inch stock because that's what we've got here, giving us this and this so very simple approach gives us a nice loose tenant, a biscuit to reinforce that joint that strength factor just went up like 11 bazillion times. Now in something like this, we wanna cut a biscuit in there. One of the things you gotta be careful about is making sure that when that slot gets cut, it's not gonna exit this face. There's another video we've got on biscuit joiners that shows you how you can gauge this to make sure that that doesn't happen. So make sure you pick up that video.

Now with biscuit joiners, there are a couple ways you can pull this off. It's gonna depend on the biscuit joiner you own. So on this biscuit joiner, it allows the fence to go to 90. I can also go beyond 90 like that. I like this a lot.

What I, the reason I like this is we're referencing off the outside corner and it's the outside corner that's critical when I put this together. I wanna make sure that that corner and that corner are aligned. So with this machine, I can do this and cut that slot. Now with this one, the fence only goes to 90. It doesn't go beyond.

So an alternative approach would be we come up, I'm setting it to 45. And what that would let us do is reference off the inside face here. I don't like that as much because the inside face is not my critical edge. It's that outside corner, but there's a workaround. Let's take this back to 90.

It's very important to me and my woodworking all the time that I use the best reference face. So on this guy, grab both parts and form them together like that. Now, with the fence on the biscuit joiner at 90 degrees, I can come in this way, make sure that you're in the right position so that we don't blow through the opposing face. And by doing this, I'm still referencing off the outside corner, but I'm cheating and I'm doing that by having my fence for a 90 and it works just as well as that other fence that folds over like that. It's a very cool thing to know about.

Now, I've got another miter on this one. The problem I ran into making it was even with a number zero biscuit, the slot that would go into that miter is going to exceed the amount of material I have available. And you can see this is already glued together. That's intentional because I'm gonna take a different approach to reinforcing this miter. I'm gonna use a number zero biscuit.

So I do still need to know how long that biscuit is. I gotta use that to dictate where the biscuit slots gonna get cut and I'm gonna want it to be about there. But in this case, what I'm gonna do is put a fence below that layout line about 3/8 of an inch below that layout line. And the reason I folded up my fence is so I can come in this way, I'm using the index line and the bottom of the machine to center right on the miter right there. So the way this one works is one, be sure you change the biscuit joiner because now we're down to a zero biscuit instead of the twenties that I so commonly use the center hash mark on the biscuit joiner was on the miter joint.

And the way we're reinforcing this guy is by using our biscuits there. So glue that in after the glue is dry, cut it and sand it flush, then you'll have a nice spline crossing that miter to help give it a lot more strength. So for this three different miters, three different approaches, three different ways to pull this off. And it's a really good idea to add reinforcement to your miters again because they're ingrain and inherently weak. And these three approaches are gonna help add those blinds, add those biscuits.

So it really strengthens it up.