I bet you didn't know this: The biscuit joiner was invented under the influence of drugs! In the 1950s, Swiss cabinetmaker Hermann Steiner had started working with particle board, which was back then a newfangled material, and he was having problems joining it. During the busy Christmas season he caught a bad fever and his wife gave him some painkillers. While he was in bed with the sweats, he had a vision for perfectly opposing slots cut into two edges of particle board, joined by an oval-shaped piece of wood. "My wife thought I had visions due to the fever," Steiner wrote, "but I myself was entirely convinced of my idea."

Steiner developed the concept into a workable machine, and his cabinetmaking shop was transformed into the producer of world-class wood-joining technologies today known as Lamello AG. At the Lamello booth at Holz-Handwerk, the machine on central display, the Zeta P2, still resembles a biscuit joiner…

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…but it does something Steiner likely couldn't have imagined, high-powered meds or no. Take a look at the funky cut this thing makes—watch what it does at the end:

That sudden up-down oscillation of the bit at the end produces an undercut, which then means that specially designed, flanged, injection-molded biscuits can be inserted like this:

During glue-ups this joinery method, which Lamello calls the P-System, eliminates the one thing furniture makers are always running out of: Clamps. The time, money and space saved by eliminating the clamping step is of incalculable value for the busy shop. Not to mention the P-System is ideal for on-site work, where pieces may need to be cut to fit the precise environment—yet the fabricator does not need to arrive with a truck full of clamping gear.

The P-System offers a variety of connectors:

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The one of most interest to me, particularly since my first ID job was in exhibition design, is the Clamex P-14 that you saw in the video above. These biscuits are detachable; used without glue, this would be the perfect (and nearly idiot-proof) connector to use for exhibition designs as they can easily be assembled and knocked down.

Another variety is the Tenso P-14, which doesn't require the pocket hole step as the connection is meant to be permanent. Instead, a male connector snap-fits into a female connector:

Then there's the Divario P-18, which has been designed for applications where, say, a shelf element needs to be slid into an existing structure between two fixed points. Imagine, for example, that you have an already-assembled carcass and are retroactively fitting in shelves, where your only option is to slide them in from the front:

While Lamello doesn't have strong brand recognition in America, in Europe they're as well-known as Milwaukee or Porter-Cable is over here. They had one of the larger booths on the trade show floor.

You can learn more about the P-System here.

P.S. What drew me to the Lamello both was this: As noisy as the Holz-Handwerk floor was, I could still hear a distinctive clattering coming from the Lamello booth and went over to investigate. A guy was demoing that contactless Invis joinery system based on magnets, and it seems just as crazy in person as it did in the video.

More from Core77's coverage of this year's Holz-Handwerk Show!