Oak is a wondrous natural material; strong and durable, changing its characteristics with age.
The use of oak pegs to join wood together is not new. In fact there is evidence of its use back in Neolithic times and shipbuilders, timber framers and furniture makers all use them in their craft.
Oak pegs are a sustainable way to join timber seeing as they are fully biodegradable but, due to the properties of oak, pegs are strong and flexible and can take shear, compressive and tensile forces acting on them.
Pegs are not dowels. Pegs are hand hewn from cleft oak blocks. Cleaving the oak to produce the wood for the pegs means the grain of the timber if followed making them as strong as possible. They are tapered in length and have an octagonal section shape. Joints are draw bored which means the holes in the two pieces of wood are slightly offset to each other. The tapered shape allows the peg to be drawn into the joint, hence ‘draw bored’. The rough, octagonal shape is beneficial in gripping the timber in the joint too.
We only use hand made oak pegs for all our structures because they are superior in performance to anything else and are the ideal fixing to use with green oak.
For more information on how we do things and to discuss your pegged oak frame project please get in touch.