I’ve been practicing Mortise and Tenon joints for the past couple of days.
I’ve found some things out about hand cut Mortise and Tenon joints.
- Shallow mortise/tenons are easier to keep square
- Conversely, deep mortise/tenons are much harder to keep square
- Deep mortise/tenons can be tuned a bit to make square after they are cut
- Keeping the mortise inside the marking lines is simpler than I thought (probably due to sharp chisels)
- Using drill bits to plow out material sounds like a great idea but is much harder than I thought. In order to accomplish this, you need to have a center line in addition to the other marking lines for the mortise. Getting that center line exactly centered is quite a challenge. That of course doesn’t say anything about how challenging it is to get the drill bit to start in the middle too.
- Shoulders are super important to get a really crisp/tight fit. It can be tuned a bit too.
- Square in all directions is harder than it sounds
My first few were pretty bad. As you can see from above though, I finally did pretty well. My next one wasn’t so good though but I was able to tune it up and get a pretty satisfactory fit. I’m going to keep practicing though and hopefully get a really consistent fit. My next project (see earlier post) will have quite a lot of these joints so I need to get it tight.
