Exploring roundwood joinery

I'm playing with round wood joinery for constructing various things out of logs, or otherwise non-dimensional wood. Largely because I have access to a lot of smaller round wood for free and less access to dimensional lumber.

So far I find myself doing a lot of round tenons and through mortises because it's not too hard to drill a round hole with an auger and shave a tenon down to the right size.

Right now I'm not talking about timber framing, but rather making smaller furniture, racks, etc. My current project which I should be finishing up when I can put another hour or two to it is a round wood bicycle maintenance stand. I've also built a few workholding pieces. I intend to make some outdoor chairs, benches, and the like in the vein of the PEP round wood badge bits in the medium term future as well.

I am not finding a lot of good resources joinery for round wood. Do you know of any good resources? Can I just miniaturize timber framing joints for furniture?

I suppose I can probably accomplish most everything with some variety of mortise and tenon, but somehow I expected to be able to find more reference material than I am.

Maybe I should be searching more for "rustic" furniture, but when I do it mostly just returns things put together with nails...

In Europe woodworkers build chairs and tables from I think green round wood.
So have a look at that, I am not sure what it is actually called as an industry.

Its called Greenwood working.

Thanks for the link John.

Green wood is a little different from what I'm doing. My wood is actually dry, but I'm using it in the round. Which means the joinery required is not quite the same as what I would use if I were putting together two flat boards, or even two lathed (or even shaved) round poles.

I'll keep hunting for information. I feel like I saw some books on project gutenberg several years ago before I had the wood to work with, maybe I still have them on a hard drive somewhere.

This is the e-book I remember seeing before!

It actually has some decent diagrams. I'll dive into this for a while and see what use I can make of it.

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/41668/pg41668-images.html

L. Johnson wrote:This is the e-book I remember seeing before!

It actually has some decent diagrams. I'll dive into this for a while and see what use I can make of it.

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/41668/pg41668-images.html

Really cool book!

I think the search term you need is "log furniture". I've done some of that stuff, and also some roundwood timber framing. If you scale up to roundwood timber framing, I recommend Kris Harbour on YouTube as a valuable resource.

Most of the joints really are as simple as drill a hole, cut a tenon to match, insert.  You can wedge the tenons, or peg them. Glue, or not.

I find it a liberating way of working, because with "log furniture" there's much less cutting to set dimensions and much more eyeballing and scribing to fit based on the material you're working with.

Here is the latest log picnic table design (version 3.0) made at the 2023 Permaculture Technology Jamboree using roundwood joinery with no external attachments.  I love the craftsmanship and function of this lovely piece of furniture.



The permaculture bootcamp is a good place to come and learn more roundwood joinery, or the  next PTJ!

Jules Silverlock wrote:Here is the latest log picnic table design (version 3.0) made at the 2023 Permaculture Technology Jamboree using roundwood joinery with no external attachments.  I love the craftsmanship and function of this lovely piece of furniture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKrimi0qj-s

The permaculture bootcamp is a good place to come and learn more roundwood joinery, or the  next PTJ!

Speaking of working with roundwood and the bootcamp, here is a short but very sweet new video on Paul's youtube channel featuring one of the bootcamp Boots Stephen about fixing several chairs and a stool.

Click here to find the video. https://permies.com/t/237045/chairs-stool-repaired-Silly-assed

Or far better for what is called YouTube love:  Go to youtube and see if it's on your suggested videos, and click and watch it from there.