Joinery

Joinery is a part of woodworking that involves joining pieces of wood, engineered lumber, or synthetic substitutes (such as laminate), to produce more complex items.

Some woodworking joints employ mechanical fasteners, bindings, or adhesives, while others use only wood elements (such as dowels or plain mortise and tenon fittings).

Because of the physical existence of Indian and Egyptian examples, we know that furniture from the first several dynasties show the use of complex joints, like the Dovetail, over 5,000 years ago.

The reason was that nails and glues used did not stand up well to the vastly fluctuating temperatures and humid weather conditions in most of Central and South-East Asia.

The result is a masterful work that may suffer from broken bracket feet, which was often attached with a glued block, which ran perpendicular to the base pieces.

In modern woodworking it is even more critical, as heating and air conditioning causes more severe respiration demands between the environment and the wood's interior fibers.

[4] Each wood species has a general respiration rate; a generally-assumed time length for acclimating a board to its locale is 1 year per inch of thickness.

These long chains of fibers make the wood exceptionally strong by resisting stress and spreading the load over the length of the board.

While lumber from a harvested tree is no longer alive, these tissues still absorb and expel water causing swelling and shrinkage of the wood in kind with change in humidity.

[7] When the dimensional stability of the wood is paramount, quarter-sawn or rift-sawn lumber is preferred because its grain pattern is consistent and thus reacts less to humidity.

When material is removed to create a woodworking joint, the resulting surfaces have the following names:[15] A joiner is an artisan and tradesperson who builds things by joining pieces of wood, particularly lighter and more ornamental work than that done by a carpenter, including furniture and the "fittings" of a house, ship, etc.

In the history of technology in Europe, joinery was the medieval development of frame and panel construction, as a means of coping with timber's movement owing to moisture changes.