Why beech?

[Tom Hammond]

I notice that biscuits and the Festool dominoes are typically made of beech. I use the biscuits during panel glue-ups, but I make my own loose tenons from whatever material the workpiece is when joining legs and aprons, etc. If I'm making an oak desk, I make oak tenons... if a poplar bookcase, I use poplar tenons.

Is there any really good reason to pick up some beech, or are these other woods OK for this purpose? Any expert knowledge in this area would be greatly appreciated.

[Van Huskey]

Abundant (but the gray squirrels are trying to fix that) and cheap in Europe probably the cheapest of the hardwoods there. It is used in a lot of joinery like dowels and compressed biscuits. It mills and shapes easily, is hard and strong, consistent grain and texture and takes glue well. The only negative is it isn't very stable BUT given its small relative size that is a non-issue.

In the end it works for the purpose and in Europe it is probably the cheapest hardwood for them to buy, mill and shape.

For non-EU biscuits it is still cheap and probably the cheapest hardwood the meets the requirements to make a compressed biscuit, which I have no idea what they would be.


Now making your own is a different story. There are some woods I would avoid for making loose tenons but other than the ones that don't meet the needs using the same material is usually perfect. Making the tenons is just one more chore most people avoid given the general low cost of joinery tenons and biscuits. Sure you can make them cheaper but add the cost of the wood and wear and tear on the cutters and machines it takes to make them no even mentioning the time and for most people it is false economy.

[Tom Hammond]

I don't mind taking the time. I use scrap material, so there's essentially no cost, and I can usually make about 1000 tenons in less than an hour using the jigs we built. For example, even if I took a 1x10-8 poplar, a board that I can buy for $12.50 or so, I can run that through my band saw to make it into about 32-35 1/4" strips of lattice in about 20 minutes. I then run those strips on my router table, using a roundover bit, and this also takes about 20 minutes. Then I stack up the strips and run them through the band saw again, using a jig we made for it, into lengths of 1"-1.5" depending on the app. We end up with about 1500-2000 tenons 1/4" x 3/4" x some length and they cost less than a penny apiece. If I bought them for $.04 each, I would end up paying $45-60 for them. So, I justify the time based on the savings... and usually have one of my young employees do it anyway... at $10-12 an hour. In fact, I've started paying him a penny each to make them. Since we don't have any "real" material costs related to it, we like to do it like this.

My main concern, though, is whether beech has some advantage over us using poplar or oak or cherry. Like I said, we always make sure we use the same wood the workpiece is made from, but I'm not convinced I really even need to do that.

[Howard Acheson]

>>> whether beech has some advantage over us using poplar or oak or cherry.

Beech is cheap but beyond that, it is a wood that expands quite a bit when wetted. That means is expands to make a tight fit in the slot.