Green Woodworking Joints

John Bullar takes a look at traditional joinery for rustic woodworking

Table of Contents
Woodworker shaping wood with a drawknife in workshop.

Green wood joinery, including country chair making, is a whole branch of woodworking with its own materials and methods. By ‘green’ we mean wood that has not been dried – regardless of its colour. While one article can only touch on a fraction of this subject, it is worth being aware of some of the basics, as they are essential to the long-term survival of all types of woodworking joints.

Coppicing

Cluster of trees in a barren winter field.
1. Much green joinery is made with wood from coppiced trees – ones that have their stems cut back near ground level. The trees re-grow a multitude of new stems which, in a few years, are thick enough to be harvested. This encourages the coppiced tree to sprout new stems and grow again, producing a regular supply of supple young wood from mature trees

Line of strength

Freshly split logs on grass.
2. Freshly cut timber is full of water – in fact the water often weighs more than the wood itself. This large ash trunk has been sawn in half longways to speed up drying and it shows the darkened heart wood. Smaller, younger pieces will be white all the way through
Close-up of a chopped wooden log.
3. As the wood dries, nature causes its fibres to shrink in thickness without much change in length. This forms splits along the length of logs. After sawing into length and drying for a few seasons, smaller diameter logs can be cleft directly into billets, using a mallet known as a ‘beetle’ and a wedge or a handled splitting tool known as a ‘froe’
Person carving wood with drawknife and shave horse.
4. Traditionally, billets are held on a shave horse (a crude forerunner to the Workmate), and then shaped using a drawknife. The worker sits on the ‘bed’ of the shave horse and uses foot pressure on the hinged frame to clamp the billets. Using a succession of pulling actions on the two handled drawknife, the billets are shaved into hexagons or rough cylinders ready for turning

Turning green wood

Person operating traditional spring pole lathe.
5. The pole lathe is a design that goes back to ancient Egyptian times. In the right hands it is a simple but very effective way of turning between centres. A rope is tied to a tall whippy branch, wrapped around the billet and tied onto an A-shaped treadle, worked with the foot. The horizontal body of the lathe is made from two timbers with a gap in between, and a pair of vertical stands called ‘poppets’ are slotted into this. Steel studding is screwed through each poppet with the ends sharpened to act as adjustable tailstocks
Hand turning wood on a lathe.
6. A rounding plane provides a quick and consistent way of shaping the tenon ends on chair spindles. Metal rounding planes come in various diameters, while the old wooden ones are adjustable
Craftsman shaping wood on a workbench.
7. You can turn green wood on the workshop lathe but be careful to keep the metal dry and rust free. Chair spindles have their ends turned to form round tenons, matching the diameter of their round mortise sockets, and these should be dry for a good fit

Wood movement

Wooden planks measured with caliper on green cutting mat.
8. If you are making joints in green wood it is important to bear in mind how the wood will shrink when it dries. I cut three samples of wood from a fresh log to exactly the same length, and then dried them all. The sample (left) cut along the length of the grain has hardly shrunk at all. The sample (middle) cut from the radius of the log between the centre and the outside has shrunk by 3%. The sample (right) cut from near the outside of the log following its rings, has shrunk by 6%
Sliced wooden oval pieces on a green grid background.
9. The different rates of shrinkage cause flat wood to change shape. To see how this happens, I sliced the end off a freshly felled log, then sliced it into a series of straight samples and dried them. These behave in the same way as a log cut along its length into boards, or cut to make blanks for chair seats. Remember – a green mortise will tighten on a dry tenon

Flat seats

Curved wooden piece on green grid mat.
10. If green boards are edge joined with the rings alternate ways up, they will dry in a wave shape making the finished piece as near flat as possible – interesting but not always desirable
Curved wooden piece on a cutting mat with grid.
11. Green boards that are edge jointed with rings the same way will all curl in the same direction, producing a deeply cupped effect. While the result is not as flat as the previous example, it might be useful for a chair seat

Chair seats

Woodworking bench with clamps in workshop.
12. If you are edge jointing wood to make a chair seat, decide which way you want the wood to curve as it dries, then glue it and clamp it as you would for making a wide flat table top
Woodworker using bandsaw to cut a wooden piece.
13. Sometimes it is possible to cut a chair seat from a single piece, like this elm. The board is still likely to change shape as it shrinks in the way we have seen, but the figuring of the wood makes it more interesting. It is increasingly difficult nowadays to find good boards that are wide enough for this

Steaming

Opening a steaming green trash can with a lid.
14. One of the most straightforward ways to make wood pliable for bending, especially green wood, is to steam it. An electric wallpaper stripper provides an ideal source of steam, then you can ‘cook’ the wood for an hour per inch of thickness in a steam chest or an old dustbin with some foil to help keep the heat in

Further reading

Setting Up a Green Woodworking Area

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN BULLAR

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