The Butt Joint is probably the easiest woodworking joint and the one used the most by non-pro crafters, it’s a wood joint for rough or rustic work.

It joins two pieces of wood by merely butting them together, either perpendicularly, such as with a picture frame, or along the same plane, as when we bond several boards side-by-side to make a larger piece of wood. The butt joint is the simplest joint to make but it isn’t automatically a stable or strong joint, mainly if you rely on glue alone to hold the pieces of wood together, because the orientations of the pieces, you have an end grain to long grain gluing surface. The resulting wood joint is inherently weak because the glue does not provide much lateral strength. It would be easy to push the ends and separate the wood joint. So what can we do to make it stronger?

The most common ways to strengthen this type of wood joint are the following:

1. Fasteners: nails, screws, and even metal brackets can be used to strengthen the joint.
2. Glue added along with your fastener of choice.
3. Dowels – drill holes and glue/insert wooden plugs.
4. Biscuits – eye-shaped thin pieces of wood that are attached by using a biscuit joiner tool that will cut a half-moon shaped groove in the two boards to be joined. The biscuit is put in after gluing the grooves, and the wood joint is clamped. Biscuits are especially good with plywood and other manufactured pieces and provide a lot of gluing surface in a small amount of space.
5. Pocket joinery – such as Kreg joinery tools where holes are pre-drilled to toe-nail fasteners in. This is stronger than just screwing into the end grain, and the advantage is that it can be hidden. Pocket joinery is pretty fast and secure, but you have to have special tools to do it correctly.

If you need more information on woodworking joints, check out this article describing all the common wood joints.