What's the Deal with Screw Pocket Joinery?

If you've been around Woodworking, without question you've heard about screw pockets or pocket holes, same thing. And that's what I want to talk about is give you an explanation of what they're all about, and show you how you can make screw pockets in your shops. So here's the deal a screw pocket is a hole that's drilled at an angle through one piece so that we can drive screws into the mating piece. So an application like this would be real common using screw pockets on the back of a face frame to join the rails to the styles. Very commonly the screw pockets are put through the end grain of the rail so that the screws go into the edge grain, a long grain of the style.

Now, in order to make this happen what we want to have done is we wanna drill a hole at about 15 degrees, just like this. And of course, there's no way that just having this in a drill and handholding it, I could get that hole to drill. So instead in order to make it happen, we need a screw pocket jig. This is one example of them there's a lot of them out there in the marketplace. The way it works is that there are drill guides in the jig, the drill, oddly enough, it goes into the drill guide.

The drill guide is set at that 15 degree angle. Now, the other thing to notice is that there's a collar on the drill bit. So as we're drilling holes that locates the depth of the hole, it stops it so that we don't just drill all the way through the piece. Now the drill bit itself is task specific for what we're doing here. It's a step drill.

So we've got two things going on here. There's a small diameter here at the tip that drills for the shank of the screw. That's the part where the threads are. And then there's a larger diameter up here. They're usually three eighths of an inch that drills for the head of the screw.

So to use it, we're going to use a cordless drill. The material so for instance, in this case if this was our rail goes into the jig, we can position it relative to the hole locations. Their centers are marked out or we can position it relative to the edge of the jig. Very rarely do I take measurements and specifically lay out the screw pockets because they're commonly on the back of a piece where they're not going to show. So I want screw pockets, but not going to take the time to individually, lay them out.

Once we've got that material clamped on the jig we're simply going to drill a hole until the step Kyler touches. Now usually you've got to give those chips a chance to clear. Don't just force the bit. If you don't let the chips clear the fluid of the bit, it just provides a lot of resistance and it makes it harder to drill a hole. That gives us our screw pockets, drilled at that 15 degree angle, allowing the screws to go from this piece into the mating piece.

A very effective way to put material together. And as you can see from doing this work very very easy to do a very handy type of joinery to add to your joinery arsenal in the shop.