Ugly, but strong

Fine joinery should serve two purposes – beauty and strength – but sometimes it only needs to do one of those.

I talked last time about joinery featuring waterfalls and continuous grain. Those are some of the most beautiful joints around, but they work only with miter joints. I’ve done hundreds or miters over the years, and love them. However, because they’re end grain-to-end grain joints, unless you also use mechanical fastening such as splines, they’re not always the strongest.

Dovetails (and, to an extent, box joints) offer both beauty and strength. A bit less good-looking, rabbets also offer a bit of both. Then, there’s this:

Yepper, that is an ugly joint. But I wasn’t going for beauty here, as this is merely a set of utility shelves I made for a basement storage area. I mean, this thing is right next to the cats’ litterbox, in a section of the basement with yellow fiberglass insulation drooping down from the joists.

On the other hand, they are very, very strong. To begin with, there are ledger boards screwed directly to the concrete walls supporting the backs of the shelves. On the font, I face-glued those support blocks on the inside of the uprights, then added a screw to each. The screws going through the outside merely hold the shelves in position.

These shelves are so strong, I have no trouble climbing them (which I have done, twice) to reach plumbing in the joists. I don’t have to worry about how heavy things stored on them are. And since no one ever sees these – except the cats – I could care less about the ugliness.

The best part about ugly is its partner: fast. These shelves went together in minutes, which gave me more time to get back in the woodshop to spend more time doing joinery that’s both strong and good looking.