Building a credenza with 3/4” plywood. Using miter joints on the carcass to avoid showing the plywood “end grain”. How can I reinforce those joints? The pros are using festool domino. I have a handheld drill and a handheld router. Can I do a dowel joint? I don’t know how to do that on a miter.
Is there a reason you aren’t using edge banding to cover the exposed edges?
I could do edge banding and switch to butt joints if I have to but I’d prefer the miters with this design.
I think a slined miter like edm00se suggested or a lock miter made with a router are probably your best bets for strength of the joint.
The joint doesn’t need reinforcement and is actually probably stronger with just glue alone.
I can think of a few ways to do this.
Some get a little advanced like using what I’ll call a partial miter, like so: https://cdn.h2ouse.org/wp-content/uploads/the-miter-joint-768x359.jpg. I’m assuming you have a table saw to make the miter/bevel cuts in the first place, so you should be able to do this with the table saw and/or your handheld router with a square cutting bit and a guide.
There are three ways to reinforce a miter joint with dowels:
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Hidden dowels. Drill holes that are perpendicular to the mitered surfacess, and it goes together like any other dowel joint. I’m unaware of a commercial jig for this; you would need to build your own to hold the drill bit perpendicular to the mitered face and at the correct location.
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“Straight” dowels. Short version: Forget it’s a miter joint and dowel it together like it’s a butt joint. Through the face of one board into the end grain of the other board. I would recommend doing this with the cabinet already assembled; it will show, but you can make that look cool. Screws and plugs are another option here, though screwing into plywood edge “grain” isn’t always the strongest.
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“Diagonal dowels.” Assemble the cabinet, drill a hole diagonally through the joint, cram a dowel through, saw and sand it flush.
If you’re comfortable making plunge cuts with your handheld router, you can do anything a Festool Domino can do, it just takes more time to set up.
Or you could do a splined miter. You can cut slots along the mitered/beveled surface with a table saw or your hand router with the guide, then make a spline that will fit in those grooves. Compared to a dowel joint, this doesn’t constrain the boards sliding along the length of the miter, but that can be a good thing because that’s one more axis you don’t have to worry about lining up your cuts.
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