I think that I mentioned when I was practicing mortise and tenon joints a few months back that I tried both the 100% chisel route and the method that first uses bit and brace followed by chisels. This early experience was very sloppy. At the time, I wasn’t exactly sure of the cause of the sloppiness.
Today I figured it out.
I once again tried the brace and bit. I first marked the mortise location including size and length. After that, I marked a centerline with a knife and was careful to get it exactly centered. I missed this step in my earlier tries and believe this was the source of my failure. In the earlier tries, I guess I was just trying to get centered by eye and feel. This clearly isn’t accurate and gets the walls varied in their position and such.
With the knife mark for the center line I was able to place the point of the screw on the bit exactly on the line (tilting so you can feel the point catch on the knife mark). This made every bore attempt to be exactly on for the width. The only areas that could be messed up are the length walls but it’s fairly easy to stay just within the marks. Using this bit and brace method makes the chisel work simple and easy and the results were very precise.
I’m very pleased with this technique.
