Basic Joint or Fixing Question

[NickN]

I have to attach a cut-off piece of the square-ish section timber on the right of the photo below to the centre of the uppermost face of the board on the left, for a saw cabinet. It will not extend to the ends of the board, as the board ends are forming a lap dovetail with the sides of the piece being constructed. So the section will be centred on that board.

What would be the best way to form this attachment/joint - given that a) I don't have dowelling or dominos or biscuits and b) the section will have saw kerfs along it but will only be aligning the saws, not carrying their or any other significant weight. I thought about a recess/housing of maybe 5mm depth, but it would be a lot of work by hand for potentially little gain? Would simple glueing (and minimal screwing) be acceptable in the context of cabinet-making, or an absolute no-no?

Thanks for any insight - all suggestions welcomed!

 

[AndyT]

Just glue is all you need.
Very theoretically two different species might expand and contract by a different percentage but on this scale I would ignore that. You are glueing face grain to face grain, which is the simplest, strongest bond.

 

[MikeG.]

Andy is right. The only difficulty you will have is locating the smaller piece in exactly the right spot as you tension up the clamps. A simple trick for this is to knock a couple of pins into the first (bigger) board roughly on the centreline of the smaller piece. Then clip the heads off with side cutters, a mm or 2 above the surface. These will then press into the underside of the applied piece and stop it wandering around as the clamps tighten up. There are lots of other ways of tackling that issue. Whatever, the glue joint will be plenty strong enough without any need for a joint, dowel, floating tongue, or whatever.

 

[NickN]

Brilliant, thanks both for the helpful replies, and at least I won't be spending a whole day chiselling and routing a recess for no reason.

With a flat surface like this surrounding the piece to be glued I might even just put four small clamps around the edge to form a frame to position it while the main clamps are applied. The cut-off nails trick is a good one too.