| Abstract: | Comparison of three types of furniture joints such as scarf joints, step butt joints and dovetail joints held together either by one or two welded dowels, glued dowels and steel nails showed that the dowels always gave better shear strength and greater stiffness than the steel nails. The results of welded dowels and glued dowel joints were found to be comparable. The application of the welded joint technique to joints where the number of dowels is limited by the narrow space in which they can be applied, such as in furniture, can give results comparable to those obtained by gluing the same dowels. |
