A Gluing Strategy for Practical Peasants

Sometime in ’01 or ’02, I visited Troy Sexton’s shop in Sunbury, Ohio, to shoot some photos of him working for an upcoming article in Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Of course, before we could begin snapping photos, we had to engage in the niceties. You know, Troy showing me how he converted one of his table saws to a meat grinder, or the jig he’d devised to make perfect wooden crossbow bolts. Or the giant bag of dried fruit he was sustaining himself on as part of a new diet plan.

This time, he handed me a fairly complicated face frame for a small cabinet and said, “Try to break it.”

So I did. I twisted it, bonked it against the concrete floor and tried to bust it over my knee. It didn’t budge. I handed it back to him with a question mark on my face.

“No joinery,” he said. “Just glue.”

Troy had assembled the face frame with yellow glue and pocket screw…