I’m about to start putting together some simple furniture and one thing I want is to have the option to collapse it, if I need to move it out of a room.
I’ve looked into confirmat screws and those are incredibly strong but have the downside of requiring specialized drill bits to use. These screws I can get easily in my market, in 500 units boxes.
Are there other options I can look into?
Added information
Material to be used will either be OSB3 or plywood.
More important than the screws is the furniture you’re building. Is it a bed? Table? Giant Victorian highboy with a bajillion drawers? The knock-down needs for all of those are different.
So uh… What are you making?
First in the order of business is a bookcase.
If you search for “knockdown bookshelf” you’ll find tons of options. But my preferred way would be:
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Vertical sides with a dado for each shelf. The top shelf should be set a few inches below the top of the side boards. Use the extra height on the sides for decoration.
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For the top and bottom shelves (and if you’re doing it tall, maybe also the middle shelf), in addition to the dadoes, make a pair of wide through mortises.
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The top and bottom shelves get extra long tenons to go through the mortises. They should stick out enough to put a tusk or wedge on the outside.
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Put all your shelves in, stick the wedges in the tenons, and enjoy your rock solid bookshelf.
Generally speaking, putting the full weight of a shelf onto any screws is a dangerous idea. Screws tend to fall immediately and completely, and that’ll take the whole shelf with it. If you prefer to go screws, still a good idea to add dadoes into your side pieces to hold the weight, and use the screws to hold the sides in place.
I apreciate the suggestion but, at best, that is overly technical and requires tools I don’t have and can’t fit in my house, like a table saw.
Opting for screws, as I see it, will allow me to build around the concept of basic boxes I can put together with a strong conector that does not require skill beyond knowing how to properly operate a hand drill, to then stack to form the final bookcase.
My concern is finding a connector that will allow for repeated assembly and disassembly, if necessary, without sacrificing strenght and ease of use, while minimizing wear and tear of the hole.
Do you have a circular saw? You can do the dadoes in the sides with that by setting up a guide and taking multiple passes. Use a chisel to clean up the base afterward and it’ll be great. For relatable assembly, maybe go for those threaded inserts combined with hex bolts.
I have but I lack the hability to use it to that level of hability. I’ve tried on very rough work, where precision wasn’t a high requirement, and the results were disastrous.
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You could either ignore the special bit “requirement” (though with MDF I suspect it’ll be problematic), or reproduce it using two bits, or just buy the bit, it’s $20 on Walmart/Amazon/Ebay, a pittance in the woodworking world.