When this happens, you rely on glue alone, which may well hold, but the idea of the joint is to create additional mechanical strength within the wood and the whole joint — integrity — integrated, whole, complete. hi paul, this is a GREAT article, and putting in the wedge the ‘wrong’ way initally in the video was a useful learning moment for me. This is the foxed (fox wedged) mortise and tenon `I made a short but informative video for on YouTube and posted a few days ago. Used with a dog welded on, and a wedge knocked underneath more often or not, great for getting plates level with each other. Fox wedging seems to be touched on as a theory of hidden mortise and tenoning with a concealed mechanical dynamic.

Anecdotally, I saw the joint used first when a door stile curved away from the shoulder of a super long rail in a massive gate for which no clamps were long enough. Which, again, doesn’t matter all that much in most cases but is worth keeping in mind for the occasions when it might prove useful. Somewhat often the author will mention and name of someone influential in the field and then mention a book that chronicles their work that also contains measured drawings. Foxtail wedging is the use of a wedge for expanding the split end of a bolt, cotter pin, dowel, or tenon to fasten the end in a hole or mortise to prevent extraction.Used for splitting mating surfaces, flanges and wedging split fasteners, this range of fox wedges are useful in the engineering industry.

Longer tenons flare out more readily than shorter ones which will offer greater resistance to spreading. Though we never cut through a section as I did, it is comforting to see just how the wedges work to both compress the wood fibres and also close off any and all relevant air pockets and that there is zero splitting. In the old days a young guy starting of in the building trade, very soon came across the use of wedges.When such wedges are needed they are needed badly; proper wedges like yours are the way to go but these days I try to get by using my selection of cold chisels; we used to make our wedges at the blacksmiths forge in the pit. Eventually I took one of the forks back to work and cut it into fox wedges using the metal cutting bandsaw. Used for splitting mating surfaces, flanges and wedging split fasteners, fox wedges are ideal for packing machinery and structures before fixing.

But a fox-tail wedge is a wedge in the end of a stopped tenon which expands the tenon as it is driven home into the mortice.In this picture you can see the different levels of polishing, on the right is a wedge that has been cut on the bandsaw, then a wedge that has been cleaned up using a flap disc in the grinder, then each wedge has been polished with a finer grade of polishing disc (the last two on the left have also been polished using polishing compound). If you look carefully, you’ll see some tool manufacturers take this approach on squares and the like. We also use them for lifting machines or creating gaps, you would be surprised on just what you can lift by knocking a steel wedge underneath a machine weighing a couple of tonnes. I decided on it for a specific reason I will reveal in the video we film in the first week of the new year. You are looking for continuous grain run extending through the tenon into the grain beyond the joint area and the reason for this is that you want the wood to remain intact inside the mortise hole itself.