How to Build Furniture With Pocket Hole Joinery

With pocket hole joinery, you can build practically any furniture. It is relatively easily compared to making specific cuts like dado or mortise and tenon. The description of pocket hole joinery is easy than it looks. It will take some practice before tackling a real project like a coffee table. The great advantage is that it can hide the heads of the nails or screws much better than other methods like the Butt joint method.

The difficulty in using the pocket hole method is making the correct angle drills and preventing the screw from going through the other side of the wood it is trying to join. There are tools that will provide a perfect angled drill all the time such as the Kreg Jig or pocket hole jig (resources below).

Joining two thin pieces of plywood. A diffcult joinery.

In the video above, a difficult example is made. The two pieces of plywood are 1/4 inches thick. Normally, you would have thicker wood or two thin pieces glued or nailed together.

First determine the angle of where the screw should go. This will determine the length of the screw. The drywall screw used in this example is too big but will suffice in this demonstration.

A straight angle drill is made initially before drilling at an angle

The entry and exit of the screw is marked with a pencil. Try to drill the easiest sides first. Before you drill at an angle, drill straight on to break the surface of the wood. Then you can cut at an angle.

After you have drilled the angled hole, make sure the holes are correctly drilled. If you screw up (no pun intended), drill another hole near (but no too near) to the mistake. You can patch up the mistake later.

Drilling at an angle.

Clamp the two pieces of wood together. Drill through the other wood slightly. Screw in the screw with the power drill.

It is best to screw into the wood until the head of the screw is inside and hidden (not shown in this example). Don't drill through the wood. Get a shorter screw if it sticks out too much.