Clamping Biscuits
George VondriskaIt's time to drop your standard woodworking clamps and check out these clamping biscuits. Master woodworker George Vondriska teaches you how they work and how they can be an easy solution in your woodworking shop for some of those more difficult-to-clamp joints.
Biscuit joiners are really versatile and there's more and more and more stuff every day that you can do with these. Let me give you an example here. You really need to know about this technique cause you're gonna find all sorts of spots. You can use it. You can actually use a biscuit joiner to clamp parts together.
Here's what I'm talking about. An application like this would be great for these biscuits. What I've got here is a small box. It's an example of what I would do. If I were building a wooden post around a steel post say in a basement.
So what happens is you go in your shop, you get two of these corners put together this one and this one. Then once you get in the basement, you gotta do this. Now my preference is never want fastener showing on the outside cause I don't like how they look and I don't wanna putty over them. I want that to be blind. Well here is the way this works.
These particular biscuits that I've got are actually clamping biscuits. They're plastic and they're barbed. So what'll happen is that as I drive the parts together, these are gonna provide holding power to hold the parts together. So let me show you how this thing works. I've got my parts marked out.
I've got lines on this one and lines on this one. So you cut the biscuit slots just the way you normally would. I'm cutting standard number 20 slots here. Now in this case when the biscuits go in, they just go in you don't glue the biscuits cause they're plastic. You can already see there's some taking some force to push those babies in there, then apply glue to your joint.
And then put that together over the biscuits. Now it's gonna take a mallet to actually close everything here. And what's happening is those barbs are grabbing a hold of the wood and they're holding the joint together until the glue dries. So those biscuits can get inserted into blind constructions like this, where you've got something that you're doing in the shaft, but then you've gotta do a field installed to get everything to come together. So clamping biscuits like this are a great way to get these parts to come together.
No nails on the outside. You gotta love that.
<strong>Ticket 37445</strong> A great idea! One question is how do you bang these together when vertical around a metal pole in a basement as you say? What backs it up for the pounding force to force the joints together? Or is that where you'd need clamps to just bring the joints closed for a moment to seat?
Wow, those are great. Especially for people like myself who have only 1 arm. I had tried a similar technique using remelted plastic (laundry soap jugs) but I made them square(ish) and used my pantorouter to cut out the grooves with a small upcut bit. I would normally just make a mortis and tenon, but for the 1/2" thick wood pieces I was using at the time, it would've been nearly impossible for me to do. So thanks for the tip! These will save me a lot of time and allow me to use my repurposed plastic for other items.
wow love the blind clamping of the pieces.
Hi I wonder if you give me the heads up where to buy these clamping biscuits or and the manufacturers name please? I'm in Australia so I appreciate I may have to send to the USA to buy them Warm regards Trevor