Baseboard: Gluing together

All the boards making up the bottom were jointed cleanly on one edge, ripped along the other edge and jointed again. The final orientation of all the boards was decided upon and all were pencil-marked to make sure they didn't get flipped onto the wrong face or turned end-for-end by mistake.

The boards will be joined with glue and biscuits, which are little football-shaped splines made of beechwood that go into slots cut on a board's edge with a special power tool.


Biscuits help reinforce the joints and make it easy to align the edges during glue-up. Without biscuits the boards, slippery with glue, would slide around quite a bit while the clamps were being put on. An advantage of biscuit joinery is that minor bowing of the boards along their length can be taken out: the biscuit slots are all cut at the same position measured below the boards' upper faces, so the faces are all pulled into the same plane during assembly.

To start with, the four right-hand boards were glued up:


After this assembly sat in the clamps for a few hours, the remaining two long boards were glued on: