Backyard Birds – Part 27

I only had a few more steps before I was ready to glue the pieces of my cabinet together to make a 3D structure.

One of those steps was making biscuit holes. Biscuit holes are crescent-shaped slots made with a power tool called a biscuit joiner.

The biscuits are small, oval-shaped pieces of compressed wood that fit snugly in the biscuit holes. They fit between the biscuit holes on two adjoining pieces of wood.

The biscuits do not add much strength to a joint – wood glue is what holds the pieces together – but they help keep pieces aligned properly during the gluing process.

The biscuits that I had on hand were a size too large for the biscuit holes, so I had to sand them down. They were also bad quality and not a uniform thickness, so I had to test out each biscuit to make sure that it fit.

Because of this, I labeled all of my biscuits and the holes that they would go into before gluing the cabinet together, so that I knew that each biscuit had been tested. Since the gluing process is time-sensitive, I wanted to know that everything was in order before I started gluing and not have to fumble for a biscuit that would work while the glue began to set.