This is exactly the kind of information I needed, and really useful general education for all of us newbies getting into carpentry. Thanks for making this!

Honestly, who would dislike this video? Like what is your complaint? This guy has has gone out of his way to test joint strength very thoroughly and you dislike the video? Please explain.

Indeed, very interesting! I'm about to build some kitchen cabinets, and just wondered which method to use on either mdf or particle board. Honestly, as there will be no movement in the units, any of the results you have shown would be adequate to construct a box. What I do find the most interesting, is the fact that good old screws on a simple but joint with glue seems to be the best and, of course, the simplest solution. I am surprised that pocket screws are less effective, but secretly pleased as this will greatly simplify the task. Thank you very much for taking the time to conduct and share what must have been a very long and arduous test!

Haha, you nailed the project farm vibe. Even got his tone of voice and descriptions for each test down. Quality content with actual application. You did a respectable job.

Interesting results! On the fulcrum, instead of a sharp screw that penetrates the wood, a small carriage bolt head might have been a better choice. Its rounded profile would concentrate the force to a small point as the screw point does, yet its smooth surface would allow the test piece to slide off as the angle changes. Allowing the point to grip the piece would, as you point out, change the results by changing the forces involved in breaking the joint.

I have seen 2 or 3 millions of vids with this topic. This is the best by far. I'm going to share it. Thanks for your work, for sure it's been a long work.

Great video. You got results like I would have expected with a few exceptions. Good job! Your intro immediately made me flash on Project Farm!

Amazing and helpful video. Right to the point i love the pace, no wasting time watching you put all that together. Thanks for all that hard work!!

Hey! I did see Project Farm for 1/2 a second. You did help me decide on the miter joint for my next set of speaker boxes.

Very helpful - I always struggled to pick joinery thats bests suit the application. Thanks for the video.

Thank you so much!! I was torn on what joinery to use when making my outdoor grill and this helped me a lot!

Thanks for doing this, answered a lot of questions about quick joinery I’ve had.

very interesting!!!

The I Build It steel dovetails for the win! Nice practical test, Brad.

Very comprehensive and helpful. Nice to see something that has real world practicality. Guess repeating it without the sharp screw and doing 3 of each sample would be great but I can see why you don't fancy it.

Fully packed with precious info, thank you.

As a newbie this the most informative video to me, thanks alot man, looking forward to see video of remaining wood joining methods like dowels, Mortis and tenant joints & much more, thanks again ❤️

Nicely done. Thanks for the effort and material put into your finding. Very interesting...

Excellent. Thanks for going through all of that. Looks like pocket holes are just fine for most applications.

I give you a lot of credit for this effort which begs another question regarding the strengths of dowels, and mortise and tenon....but that we'll save for another day. That's aboooot it....best wishes from sunny Kauai!

Fascinating. I learned a lot about the cheaper materials and how to apply it to what I want to achieve. I was hoping to see a test where the ends had the boards routed with a thin finger joint so they fit into one another, glued. I bet that would be a very strong corner joint. Thanks for taking the time to go through all these and post your results!

Nice work, thanks ! I'm just an amateur DIY'er and what I saw was simple butt joints & 2" screws FTW. Which basically agrees with a similar video I recently watched. I don't need to deal with messy, time consuming glue. I don't need to spend extra time & money for biscuit joiners, pocket hole tools/screws & rabbit joints. And I can save some $$ with cheaper woods like MDF... and still have a relatively strong joint. I wonder how mitre joints with screws would have done. But since I don't have any circular / mitre saws, it doesn't really matter to me.

Thank you for conducting the test. It gave a beginner a good starting point to consider when starting and planning out a project. Have a good one

Dude, I love this simple approach to test these with everyday thing we all have, Great job. I think you should loose the screw and do them all at the same distance from the joint.

Awesome video! Even after cutting your thumb the work continued - much appreciated. Looking forward to version 2 in the years to come

I love you for doing this! I'm making rolling shelves for animal cages, and this is going to help me make everything safe and sturdy!

This I right up my alley. Years ago,,,,im74. We used to always nail ,nail and glue, or as they say" screw it and glue it". Many years later I started making musical instruments. No place for metal fasteners in violins guitars and ukuleles. It amazed me how strong these instruments are using glue only. Also very narrow glue lines in most application.move along a few years and I decided to make a ply wood boat. Using epoxy glue I screwed and glued all the joints . After the glue set I removed all the screws and filled the holes with epoxy filler. It worked fine. Boat still solid and strong. Now I make a lot of furniture for my house for the sake of simplicity and past experience is use very few screws or metal fasteners. I sometimes use through Dowell's applied after the butt glued join dries . More often though I will just glue and clamp. A cross grain cleat or another component glued in place give plenty of strength. Chairs are the only items that really experience extreme trauma. Even chairs can be engineered for glue or Dowell. Or mortice and tenon joints. My point is that in most cases a bit of careful cross grain engineering,the odd Dowell etc combined with the amazing power of modern PVA like titebond and gorilla woodworking glue make nails and screw unnecessary My guest don't normally stand on tables or bring their pet elephant with them. I'm sure my furniture will last a lot longer than will Thank for the testing you did, it is very informative and provides a lot of food for thought. Geoff from Tasmania

Very well done! Thanks for this valuable information!!

Thank you for all these comparisons!

"Very impressive score!" i loled

What an outstanding, well done video! To me, the results give me the main thing I was looking for - if aesthetics aren’t super important (MDF or plywood), glue+screws gives the strongest joint - but where aesthetics are important (solid woods and maybe melamine and Baltic birch ply), glue+pocket hole screws should be plenty strong. Good to know that a glued miter joint is just as strong for melamine as glue+pocket hole screws. Per all the comments below, I’d love to see a follow-up video with additional joints included (dowels, mortise-n-tenon, box joint, dovetails, and splines) - with a better contact point than the screw so it doesn’t dig into the wood and compromise the results. While the results you posted are probably good enough to tell most of us what we need to know, it’d be nice to see a second set of data with the problems/omissions addressed.

WOW, incredible video! Clear, to the point, concise, and TONS of info in a short space without all the junk-fill that other youtubers cram in! I'm subscribing!

I was just researching this today This should be good

Thanks! I was going to build a subwoofer box and was planning on buying a pocket hole jig, not any more, looks like the regular old butt joint with screws is the way to go. -Cheers

Thank you

Cool data , thanks for taking time out, and putting it together very helpful adding to the toolbox of knowledge

Fantastic video, thank you for putting together. I would point out, like many others, that the screw as the touch point would distort the joint measurement by skewing based on the softness of the wood. It would have been better to simply have a block and then there would be little to no variance based on the pressure point. Also would have been good to have a contact block above that would then measure the failure point exactly every time. But again, awesome video and tons of work involved. Thanks!

Fascinating results . Thanks a lot for being this up

what i learned: butt joints and screws are way stronger than people give credit for.

Liked and subscribed! Excellent test covering so many types of joints and woods.

That is truly taking one for the team! Thank you sir!

Awesome video mate, was watching all the way through and started to think I'd love to see the results in a bar chart or graph, and then boom 💥💥 a bar chart at the end 😁😁💪💪

I appreciate the effort you put into this.

This is the best joinery comparison video I've seen. Love it if you could pickup where this left off and make a part 2 comparing dowels and 45 degree dowel joinery.

This is exactly the video I was looking for, thanks!!

Thankyou for the videos. Keep up the great work.

You went to such a great effort to give this video to us, I really appreciate that. Liked and subscribed, Thankyou for your hard work.

this was an awesome test. Thanks for putting in so much time.

I work in quality assurance in a mill (we make I beams and lvl) and these tests really show results well I think. It all depends on grain structure of the wood as well. Some of the tests you can see failed due to the laps in plywood and or knots near the joints. Just a few of the variables I saw. Good testing rig though. It's very enjoyable to watch and a very different type of content from normal.

Awesome! Thanks for doing this and sharing!

Great vid, I can really see the Project Farm influence. What type of glue did you use? and did you follow the manufacturer's recommended "dry time?".. its shocking glue plus nails did not do far better than just nails. Also curious why you choose to use the screw as your contact point.

Thank you for taking the effort to do this... very useful for a DIYer :)

Very useful. Thanks!

Thanks a lot for doing this. It answered many questions.

Amazing. Thank you so much

Brilliant vid! Straight to the point, no bull 😊

I quality test rolled aluminum 50 hrs a week and this is a very underrated video. Thanks for testing, think I’ll stick with mitered pine.

This is superb content! Very insightful that the 2 screws + glue seem stronger than pocket screws + glue. Pocket screws seem to be getting all the recommendations and hype but can be a pain to use, and your video proves how sometimes they are unnecessary.

Thank you for your work!

I think this is more insight-dense than 99% of peer-reviewed papers I've read. Fantastic!

you just saved me a TON of work and some $$$ thank you subcribed just after watching this vid (added bonus, SUPERB and i mean superb video quality even at 720p, and thank you for the clear sound) cant say enough

Very good information! Thank you so much.

Thanks so much! Great info!

Thank you for making this great vid!

Dude got total Project Farm vibe there, even the mannerisms.

Thank you sir! This is exactly what I needed to see.

thanks a lot for the information!

The question is: When did your finger fail?

GreT video. I wouldn’t want to do all that work again either. Maybe not even once! Very informative

Thanks for the great test!

I love this video and it would be awesome to test each joint from different directions.

Awsome job mate exactly what i was looking for, earned yourself a viewer and subscriber!

Enjoyed the video!! Good job!

I saw the reference of project farm on the first 2 seconds of the video! Amazing. He could've record the intro for you...

Thank you very much, very useful information.

My confusion relating to the wood joints just came to an end. The useful one indeed.

This is insanely informative

Great idea,great video. It be interesting to see wood glue comparison on butt joint. Thanks for making this video for us.

This is a great video! Thank you!

Amazingly done...

Hola, Muchas gracias por este video.No he visto a nadie hasta ahora hacer este tipo de prueba tan importante en la carpintería.Muchas gracias por compartir sus conocimientos.Disculpe mis ingles pues soy cubano. Hello, Thank you very much for this video. I have not seen anyone so far do this kind of important test in carpentry. Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge. Excuse my English because I am Cuban.

Lots of works, thanks for doing it. I’m not sure I agree with the conclusion that if the test piece bends past the screw’s length the joint fails. But, I will surmise we got our answers anyway and appreciate the work you put into this experiment.

very interesting and useful

Thanks for this video... This video is very useful for me🙏

it was so interesting test. thanks for efforts. thumbs up

Awesome! Thank you!

thank you !

good info thank you soo much for all the effort.

thanks

Very good tests.

Well done!

Very nice. Would love to see one with more consideration of dowel joinery, domino, and mortise and tenons. Currently this only looks at edge to end grain - I bet edge to edge would also yield different results, too.

Thanks. Well done. I wonder where dowel joints would stand.

We ought to repeat this experiment to get a better understanding of variability per joint, per material. Should be crowdsourced so no one person has to make thousands of these joints xD. People practice making joints anyway so might as well measure em! I think the flaw in this test setup is as you’d pointed out: the screw embeds itself in the material. IMO, this means it’s not measuring load until embedment stops, until then you’re measuring how well materials resist puncture. This can be improved by mounting a metal plate before pushing the screw against it. This eliminates any embedment and you’d measure pure point-source loading. Other variables to consider: Load distribution and where load is applied. We probably want to pick the worst case of each to get a most conservative estimate of failure (i.e., we can expect better performance in real-world application).

Fantastic.

I've seen many versions of wood joint testing & your's is one of the best! Nicely done & the results speak for themselves. One thing that I am curious about is why you used a screw through the wood for the testing? Why not just use an elevated flat piece of metal that would put even pressure across the entire piece being tested? Just curious.................. Thanks for posting 👍👍

I love your project farm's reference

Did you use hardwood pocket hole screws on the hard maple?

I can see a lot of inspiration from Project Farm. I like his format too.

Finally some educational video after thousen useless videos on youtube. Congrats, man! And thank you for trying all that stuff for us!