The Workshop
Drawbore is a small workshop in Hudson, New York. We make hardwood furniture that ships flat and goes together with a mallet, using a joint that was standard practice for four hundred years and then got replaced by a screw.
Why a peg instead of a screw
A screw holds because it cuts a thread in the wood around it. Hardwood moves — it swells in a humid July and shrinks in a dry February — and every cycle wears that thread a little. After a few years the joint has a wobble in it, you tighten the screw, and the thread gets worse. That is the whole life story of most flat-pack furniture.
A drawbored peg holds for a different reason. The hole through the tenon is bored deliberately out of line with the hole through the post, by about 2 mm toward the shoulder. When a tapered peg is driven through both, the only way it can pass is by dragging the tenon deeper into its mortise. The joint is not held closed by the peg so much as held closed by its own compression, with the peg keeping it there.
Because the peg is the same species as the furniture around it, it moves at the same rate. Nothing loosens seasonally, because nothing is fighting anything else.
What we actually do here
- Buy quartersawn American white oak and let it sit in the rack until it reads the same moisture twice, a month apart.
- Cut mortises and tenons, then bore each pair of holes with a jig that sets the 2 mm offset the same way every time.
- Rive pegs out of offcuts so the grain runs the length of the shaft, then taper them.
- Dry-fit every piece on the bench, take it apart, oil it, and pack it flat.
What we do not do
- Cam locks, barrel nuts, threaded inserts or any other steel fastener.
- Veneer, MDF cores or edge banding.
- Stain. The colour in the photographs is oak and oil, nothing else.
[TO CONFIRM: founding year, number of people in the workshop, and whether the street address should be published.]