Mastering Pocket Hole Joinery

In this video, Gary Striegler shares tips on achieving the best results when using pocket hole joinery for woodworking projects. He discusses essential techniques, tools, and best practices for creating strong joints efficiently. For more woodworking insights, visit the Carpentry with Gary Striegler on YouTube.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, I'm Gary Striegler. What I want to share with you today is something that's really near and dear to my heart: how to get the very best results when you're pocket screwing joints together. If you watch any videos at all that I've done, you probably see me use pocket hole joinery to put things together—basically, Kreg joints.

There are lots of different ways that you can make the cuts for that joint. Here’s an example of a piece with two holes. Kreg sells machines ranging from around $40 up to several thousand dollars, but all those machines make the same hole. It’s just a matter of how fast you make it.

The goal when we put wood together is to create a strong joint as quickly as possible with a minimum of sanding. Kreg does that for me. However, there are several things we want to cover that will help ensure you get a really good joint.

One of the first things is that it's really helpful if all your material is the same thickness or close to the same thickness. The next thing is that you need to have square, clean edges. In other words, I don't want soft curves or anything rough. If this edge is on a little bit of an angle, that’s how the joint will go together.

The same goes for this end; it needs to be cut square. If it’s one degree out, that’s how the joint will come together. We want to avoid any of those issues.

I always use glue in these joints unless it's something I’m going to be taking apart. One nice thing about using pocket hole joinery is that it can give you a temporary joint. If you need something for a temporary spacer, you can pocket screw something in there and then take it back out. But generally speaking, what we’re looking for is how to make a really strong joint.

The vast majority of everything I do is 3/4 of an inch thick. Kreg has two different types of screws available. Well, they may have more than that, but generally, I'm either going to use a coarse thread screw, which is an inch and a quarter, or a fine thread screw.

For softwoods and plywoods, you want to use the coarse thread screw. For hardwoods, you want to use the fine thread screw. One of the things I want to show you is that we always want to clamp the joint. Depending on the width, I can go down to about an inch and a half and put two screws in, but when I get to a wider piece, I’ll probably want to put three in there.

I want to show you that I use three different types of clamping. One principle I need to emphasize is that when I'm putting a pocket hole joint together, we always want the screws coming through the end grain into the edge grain. That edge grain is what's going to hold the screw. If I were to try to screw from this into that end grain, it would create a much weaker joint and might even crack.

So always remember to screw through the edge grain. Occasionally, I have joined wood like this, where you’re going from edge grain to edge grain. However, most of the time, our rule is to come out of the end grain and into the edge grain.

This is a project involving some cabinets I'm building in the shop. The first thing I’m going to do is make sure everything is nice and straight.

Let’s grab some glue and put it right there. This is a clamp I like a lot because all I have to do is drill a 3/4-inch hole in my top, and then there’s a washer that goes underneath it. Basically, any place I can drill a 3/4-inch hole, I can use this.

I’m an old-fashioned guy. They do have some clamps that adjust automatically, but I still prefer the ones where I can do a little turning myself. Part of that is because the vast majority of the material I use is 3/4 inch thick, so adjusting for thickness isn’t a big deal.

Especially on a wide board, you want to clamp and move the clamp back and forth because you want to drive the screw right where the clamp is. Most of the clamping pressure should be on the board that’s receiving the screw. The screw is coming in at a slight angle, which will naturally push this piece down.

I love that I’m getting to put this together one joint at a time. I already have a very smooth, flat joint, and it’s going to get a little stronger as the glue dries.

Let me see if I can reach through here and show you all this without dropping it. Anywhere I can drill a hole, I drop this in and tighten it up. Of course, this is a Kreg product.

Another clamp I really like is the plate clamp. It has a nice big clamp, but it’s probably got a little more glue on it than it should. If you want to keep that scraped down pretty well, I use this all the time.

The thing about this is that I can move it anywhere on my workbench that I want to. There are workbenches available with holes in a grid, which allows you to use that clamping where you need it.

Now, let’s see here… oops, this is the piece I want. I’m going to put a little glue on this. I love it when I get material that’s super straight. By the way, this is beech, so I’m using the fine screws because beech is definitely a hardwood.

One of the things I had to learn is how to do it left-handed sometimes, and I’m not as good left-handed. As a matter of fact, I’ve noticed that quite a few things don’t work quite as well as they did about 25 years ago when I first started using pocket screws—my eyesight and my hand-eye coordination.

I hope I can keep on! So that’s how this clamp works. Now, there might be a time when this is the simplest clamp—the first clamp I ever used. If there’s a time when I need to make a joint where I’m not on the table or if I didn’t own one of those clamps, this clamp will work fine.

Now I am in a situation where I need to put glue on both ends of this piece. So, I’m trying to make it so that most of the clamp is still on the piece that’s going to receive the screw.

I didn’t drop near as many screws back in the day when I started either. So, that’s the three different clamping options. I’ve covered the basic rules.

There is one other thing I might just share real quick: for this frame, everything is lined up on the corners, but if I needed to put a board out here instead of flushing the edge, I would put a couple of indexing marks so I know exactly where I need to make that joint.

This is probably, by far, the way that I do most of my woodworking—joining wood together. There are lots of other applications for this technique. Again, the most basic application for a Kreg jig and pocket hole joinery is putting a frame together. Other companies make jigs and tools, but I’ll tell you, Kreg is my go-to, and you won’t be sorry using any of their equipment.