What Is Shaping a Fastening Wood?

Wood Shaping

• The process of wood shaping is exactly what it sounds like: using tools to modify the shape of wood. Technically speaking, changing the shape of wood in any way, including simply spitting a board in half, qualifies as shaping. However, shaping more commonly refers to the use of tools like rasps, files, saws and spokeshaves to carve wood into shapes for specific uses. For instance, when a carpenter sculpts pieces of wood to build a chair, each piece of the chair constitutes shaped wood.

Wood Fastening

• A wood fastening constitutes a wooden device used to fasten two things together. Numerous types of wood fastenings exist, all of them designed to join specific types or shapes of wood surfaces or materials to one another. For instance, numerous types of fasteners appear in wooden boat construction. These fasteners are basically joints that are designed so one piece of wood fits snugly into another. Similar types of fasteners appear in wood frame construction projects like homes and barns.

Shaping a Fastening

• Shaping a wood fastening entails shaping a fastening from wood. The tools used for shaping a wood fastening depend upon the type of wood used and the type of fastening you create from that wood. Shaping dense wood requires different tools than shaping light wood, while creating fastenings in small pieces of wood requires different tools than shaping a large fastening in big boards of wood. Shaping fastenings in the simplest terms requires nothing more than creating a peg at the end of one piece of wood and a hole in another piece of wood to put the peg into.

Strengthening Fastenings

• The authors of the book “Fundamentals of Wood Construction” call wood fasteners the weakest part of traditional wooden house designs. The argument holds that because you must shave material from wood to create a fastening, it weakens the wood and therefore creates a weak bond. If you undertake carpentry projects and want to shape wood fastenings, reinforce your fastenings with things like sealants and glue or screws, nails and bolts, particularly when building things like walls or boats, which must hold up under pressure.