50 Australian Wood Review
45mm wide (photo 7). For small cabinet doors I have found
biscuits will yield lasting results, however in my doors I glued a
plywood panel in the door frame so the whole assembly is rigid.Corner butt joint
For basic cabinet work with solid or manmade panels
biscuits are good for corner joints (photos 8, 9). Examples
are melamine panels or veneered MDF cabinetwork.Edge joining boards
Biscuit joinery is a great use for tabletop making as the
biscuits align the top edges almost perfectly (photo 10).
I am not a big fan of gluing the biscuits fully in this
application. An air-dried oak tabletop I made using glued
biscuits had, after quite a few years, opened up a tiny bit
on the joint line only where the biscuits were located. The
rest of the glueline was perfect. In this case I guess the air-
dried wood shrank in widtht, which is fine, but the biscuits
with their angled grain direction couldn’t move along with
the rest of the wood. So now I would only glue half of the
length of the biscuit, to cover myself.Raf Nathan is a furniture designer and maker who lives in
Brisbane. Email: [email protected]- Biscuits can be used to align boards for tabletop or panel glue-ups.
- Multiple biscuit joiner slots can be used for fitting tabletop buttons.
- Using the biscuit joiner to cut slots for mitre keys.
- Now it’s a matter of gluing in filets of wood and trimming them off later.
10 11
12 13
Table clips
Fixing tabletops is made easy by biscuit cutting the slots
for the clips (photo 11). Adjusting the depth between two
cuts you can make say an 8mm slot that suits a shop made
table clip. Metal clips from trade suppliers fit pefectly in
the joiner’s 4mm slot.Mitre keys
With the tool sitting on top of a mitre it can be plunged into
the wood and cuts a fairly neat slot for a key (photo 12, 13).
It is not a super accurate way to cut these and the blade is
exposed at one point so I only use this method occasionally.As you can see, there are many good reasons to include the
biscuit joiner in your tool kit. They are simple and fast to
use and the biscuits themselves are quite inexpensive.Photos: Raf Nathan