Welcome to make something
with me, David Picciuto today, I'm going to show you 10 ways to
reinforce miter joints and picture frames. Today's video is sponsored by Squarespace. We are going to talk about 10
ways to reinforce miter joints, particularly in picture frames. Some you do before the glue-up
and some you do after the glue up. Let's talk about if you even
need to reinforce these joints, we have 45 degree angles. It's mostly end grain and the end
grain works like a straw and just soaks up the glue. One way to strengthen a glue only
miter joint is to put glue on there, let it dry, and then put more glue
on there and glue them together. That way the end grain doesn't soak up
all of the glue in the drying process. This has no reinforcement. This
might last years and years, the wood is going to expand and contract. All four pieces are going to
expand and contract together.
So this might last a long time. As that wood expands and contracts, it might loosen that joint and
it might finally break apart. That could be years down the road. It could be never if you're building
picture frames for yourself and you know, you don't need it to last a lifetime. You might not even need
to reinforce those joints. If you are building picture frames that
you want to last a lifetime or that you are selling or giving
away to somebody else, I would definitely reinforce
those joints. Now, if I drop this, it might break. It might not.
It might be strong enough. I'm going to show you at the end
of the video, if that broke or not, we're going to go over 10
ways to reinforce this. Some of them are quick and dirty and
some of them are a little bit more involved. I'm saving my favorite
and the strongest for last.
That is the mitered spline with the jig. We're going to make the jig
at the end of the video. So let's get started
with those first nine. Probably the most simple is
just a hammer and a nail, not the best solution, but it's
the easiest solution. Also, you could break apart your
frame while doing this. So you have to be really careful.
I'm a little worried myself. Then you would come in from the other
side and do the same. And there we go, but got a nail on each side, going in there and you can,
you can somewhat see it, but for the most part, it's hidden. If you're worried about
the wood splitting, pre
drill, that hole number two, and this is same thing, but a lot easier with a 18 gauge
brad nailer. So once again, just going to throw this in here. Again, you can see the hole in there.
If you're going to go the easy route, it's not going to be perfect. Number three, and probably my least
favorite is with a biscuit joiner.
After the glue up. Typically a biscuit,
joiner cuts a little, a little slot, and then you can put a biscuit
in there and glue those together. That's a teaser for later, but
we're going to do it on the outside. So I have my frame clamped down
to the bench and I'm going to come in at a 45 degree angle. And I'm going to cut a
little slot in there. For the spline, I'm going to use
a contrasting piece of maple, and we're going to take
this over to the table, saw and sneak up on the perfect fit. I don't want to cut all the way through
just because it's going to cut through my push stick. This is
all I need right here. Don't worry about the burning.
That'd be covered up.
Mark our line, cut that out with a handsaw or bandsaw. So now we'll just add a little bit of
glue and you let that sit and dry and we'll come back with a flush
trim saw and cut that off. Or… So this next one we're going to do at the
router table with a one eighth inch slot cutter. This shank has a removable blade and
you can put different sizes on there. I've got a one eighth inch blade on there
and it should be the same size as the biscuit joiner and the table saw blade. I am going to use this miter
gauge that I have set up here. If your router table does
not have a miter gauge, cut a 45 on a board and you want to
get the same thickness as your frame. And then you can take this with a, with a paddle and run that
through. Have I mentioned, this is my least favorite method? If you have any gaps like that one is absolutely perfect, but if you, sometimes
you might get a little chip out.
If you have any gaps
that is not Nestles Quik. That is actually Walnut sawdust that I
keep on hand and just use a little bit of CA glue. And then a little
bit of that, rub it in. No gaps. You can't even see that.
Some people use wood glue. I like using CA glue just cause it
dries so fast and you get instant satisfaction. This method
also uses a spline, but we're going to do it before glue up.
And we're going to run a spline
on the inside of this joint. We're going to do it
here at the table saw. I'm going to show you two ways to do
it. The safest way is with a spline jig. Like I have here that
runs along your fence. I'm going to show you how to
make it at the end of the video. And then I'm going to show
you the not as safe way, but if you're comfortable with it way. So I've got my blade set to
half inch high and I'm going to run a groove right down
the middle here. Oh, also this is my least favorite method. This method not quite as
safe, not nearly as safe, but if your piece is wide enough
and you have enough flat surface, you can just set this up against
the table saw table and then run this through and we should be fine.
And again, we cut splines out, cut a little on the end
there at the bandsaw, and we'll just glue this in. And then this one, basically the same
as the table saw, except once again, we're using the slot
cutter here at the router. This next one… Probably
one of my least favorites, but it's one of the easier ones.
I've got a forstner bit in my drill, and I'm going to do one of these
numbers on a glued up frame.
I want to go down one eighth of an inch,
which is the thickness of some plywood. This is a one and a
quarter inch forstner bit. So now we're going to draw one and a
quarter inch circles on here and cut this out over at the band saw. Now, of course, if you have
a CNC or a laser cutter, you can be really precise with those
circles and you can batch out a bunch all at one time and then always have
that at your disposal in the future.
This is the back. So, you
know, my fit's not perfect, but that's fine because typically this gets covered up with paper. Anyway,
if you put a dust cover on there, nobody will ever see this.
If it's hanging on the wall, no one's ever going to see this. So that's a quick and dirty way and
that's plywood. So that's nice and stable. Number eight, which is probably my least favorite method
is the biscuit joiner before glue up. And then that is going to go in there, like,
so that is going to go in there. Like, so biscuit number nine is the domino. And that uses the Festool. Domino
joiner. It's like the biscuit joiner, except it uses these little
wooden tenon, not the biscuits. The cool thing about the
Domino is it's super expensive. But it doesn't, it doesn't cut a
huge slot. Like the biscuit joiner, it cuts a small slot like
this. For the biscuit joiner, you have to have a picture frame that's
at least two inches wide.
The domino, you can have narrower picture frames. Now we're using my frame clamping jig. I've got a video on this really cool, clever jig it's been
around for decades. So I came out really good. Now it
is time for my favorite wine, which is the mitered spline. And that takes a special jig that
rides along our table saw offense. So let's go make that jig for this jig. It's going to go together pretty
darn quick. It's pretty simple. And it doesn't need to be crazy precise. So we need to make two pieces
that are the height of the fence. That's going to wrap around
the fence. So I've got my, what do you call this, Dan? So now that we have the two side pieces
that are going to turn the fence into a sandwich, we need to make
one more piece.
That's the sum of this. We're going to clamp these guys to
the fence, lightly clamp to the fence, and we can just glue and screw this onto there. So we've
got that goal on there. I got them pre-drilled you just want to
make sure that this doesn't stick out at all this way when you screw this down. Cause that's going to interfere with the
board that we're going to put on over here. And if it does slip out, we can sand that off. Ain't no thing. Always get the screw started first. I'm retiring. Now that, that slides
along there and you got no, no wiggle. We're going to attach another board.
That's going to go on right here. And we're just going to glue
and screw it just like before. And you do want to make
sure that it's square. It shouldn't be if you're using plywood. So now we need to cut two little runners.
That's going to hold the
picture frame in place on the one end of each piece,
I'm going to cut a 45 on here. Not 100% necessary.
Woodworkers love overkill. So I know when I want my frame
in the jig, I want the tip of it. Just the tip to kiss. Just the tip, kissing the top of the I am. Whew, it's getting hot in here. I know that I want the tip to
just kiss the top of the table. So that's going to go in there like that. This piece is going to go in here like
that this piece is going to go in here like this.
And I know that I do want these pieces
to be up a little bit and out of the way of the blade. So it's going
to go in there like so. Speed square is going to
come in handy for this. So I'm gonna throw my speed
square on the edge there. I've got a line right here where I
want this to come down to and I can line both of those up, but I also need to bring
in a frame in here so I can kind of figure out where
everything is going to go. I'm gonna draw a line right there.
And now when I glue and screw this in, I can just kind of line
it up with that line.
Using CA glue because
it dries really fast, some activator on there.
So it dries even faster. And now I can use this as a
guide over here. Double check. Make sure that tip comes
right down. Yup. All good. So once that dries, nice and good. Double check everything. Perfect. Perfect and perfect. So I'm just going to
take a flush trim saw. One of the things that really annoyed me
about my old spline jig was getting one of these clamps up here and screwing it
down every single time and then running this through. So this time I've got one of
these self adjustable self adjusting toggle clamps, that's
going to go in the middle here.
So that goes on there
like so I can toggle that down. Now. You don't want the really big one
because it's going to get in the way of smaller frames like this, but
this one opens up like that. Throw that in there toggle that down
and then we can run this through. I think we have one more picture
frame we can run through here. Once you get your frame on
there, you clamp that down. Then you can just move your
fence over to where you want it. I'm going to put this over there so I can
kind of see if you want to go right in the center and you just eyeball it.
You set your blade to the right height. I don't want to go that deep. Let's uh,
there we go. How about that? Dan says, yes. We didn't use the flat bottom grind blade, but really you can't even tell
that's 10 ways to reinforce miter joints for picture frames.
This is my favorite by far.
So I have a video on the making
of this picture frame sled. I've got a video on this gluing jig, and then you're watching the video for
this. We're going to turn off the lights, go into spaceship mode. And we're going to use all three
of these jigs to make a frame. While we are in spaceship mode. I would like to tell you about today's
sponsor and that is Squarespace. I've talked a lot about how Squarespace
makes setting up and updating your site really easy. They've
got beautiful templates. Today I want to dive in just a little
bit deeper and tell you about how Squarespace helps me
and my business succeed. Connected services with Squarespace. So if you've got a Twitter or
Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn, you can bring that right into Squarespace
to condense your digital life all into one place.
And Squarespace also has a variety
of extensions to expand your website. I used to ship all of my merch
right here, out of my house. And I use these Squarespace extension
for ShipStation to do so to help with printing the labels. These days, I use
a fulfillment center called Printful, which connects directly to Squarespace. All of my orders go right through
my website and get sent to Printful. Printful print and
shipped all of that merge. Squarespace takes care of all of that
behind the scenes and makes my life so much easier. For taking payments.
You can connect your Stripe account, your PayPal account, your Apple pay
for shipping. You can connect ups, the US Postal Service, FedEx. All of these things can connect
to your Squarespace site. So you have one hub for your digital life. With Squarespace's
connections and extensions. It just makes my life so much easier
and helps my business to succeed.
So visit squarespace.com and
when you're ready to launch, visit squarespace.com/makesomething for
10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Also just go to squarespace.com and look
at all the different things that you can connect to your
site. It's pretty cool. Thank you Squarespace for allowing
me to do these crazy videos, allowing me to be weird.
Thank you for watching. Let's get back to these picture frames. Thank you for watching. I have plans for all of these jigs
on my website at makesomething.com.
We'll see you next week with a brand
new project as always be safe, have fun, stay passionate and make
something! All four joints broke. I thought it would just break into
two. It broke all four joints. So, um, and I did wipe the glue on there, let it dry and then wipe
more glue on there to glue those those up. So, uh,
yeah, not, not very strong..