This Week in Wood » Mortise and Tenon

Frame Glue Up

glennth — Thu, 27 May 2010 17:55:28 +0000

I finished the frame pieces and dry fitted them. I’m pretty happy with the results though similar to most woodworkers, I can see every error and blemish in the project and that frustrates me. I believe that I can fix a few of them after the glue up so that is the plan that I’m going with.

Overall the frame is square and stable which in a desk frame is what you need.

I still need to work on the drawer rails and the drawer itself. I’m going with wooden slider rails with a groove in the slide that matches up to them. Also I’m going to push the fates and try a half blind dovetail for the drawer front. This should be real challenging.

For the top, I’m planning to reflect a coffee and side table in the same room. The coffee and side table have moulding pieces around the field of the top. The moulding is simply angled on the bottom (thick at the field and thin on the edge). I’m going to do this by angling the outer edges and do it without moulding. I’ll use hand planes to get the angle that I want. I’ve already glued the top up but still need to square it up and smooth/flatten the top.

Notice that from the dry fit, that I’ve added the front lower drawer rail and the lower middle support cross member. I was thinking about adding another member going from the lower middle to the lower back but the frame already seemed very stable and strong so I didn’t feel it needed it.

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Frame Glue Up

Brace and bit

glennth — Mon, 24 May 2010 02:40:24 +0000

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.

Standing Laptop Desk – Tapered Legs

glennth — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 05:22:27 +0000

I’ve been making progress over the week. It’s been very slow going. After roughing the dimensions of the legs, I wanted to get them more exactly square, plummed. This takes a long time.

After that, I wanted to get the tapers done. This took figuring out which legs will be the front and which part of each legs will be inside vs outside. Once that was done, I needed to determine the amount of the leg to leave at the foot. I determined a one inch square tapered from the outside (close to 2 inch square) over 12 inches. I then marked these out and sawed some of the waste away. After that, I used my hand planes use rough, medium, smooth plane setups to remove the rest of the material and get a near finish ready surface.

Here are shots of 2 of the legs. Since this picture which I took on Tuesday, I have finished all the legs. I want to do a bit of fine tuning then it’s off to cutting the top aprons and the bottom braces and getting them ready to do mortise and tenons in the appropriate places.

Project Wood

glennth — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 03:06:05 +0000

OK, I’ve finally gotten the wood (actually I got it last week). I got, hopefully, the right number of board feet of maple for a Standing Laptop Desk with drawer. The entire desk will be maple except for the drawer. The inside of the drawer will be pine and the front face (with half blind dovetails – never done those before so should be fun) will be maple. The top of the desk will be 41″ high for standing or sitting on a stool. The primary purpose for the laptop is to work with me playing my guitar and learning songs.

See my previous post on the Standing Laptop Desk for a general idea of what it should look like.

Here is a shot of most of the wood stickered waiting to be prepped.

New Tools

glennth — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:53:21 +0000

I suppose that a woodworker may never have enough tools so it’s never really news when a woodworker gets some new tool. I feel like I’m approaching a place where I can get increasingly choosy about which tools I get and when. I have a nice selection of saws, chisels, hand planes, measuring and marking tools. As I move through my practicing of various hand tool techniques I do find a small tool here and there that would be useful in simplifying the task. My observation in these tools, unlike my previous power tool life, I am finding that these tools are simpler and more basic.

Here is a shot of my new tools:

On the top left is a divider. In practicing my dovetails, I am getting increasingly happy with my cuts and fits of the joint but have noticed that my rough guesses at where to make pins/tails and how wide to make them is looking non-uniform. While I feel that hand cut parts should have some non-uniformity to them, I would like a closer sense of symmetry just from an artistic point of view. In watching various dovetail experts, I noticed that Rob Cosman uses dividers to get symmetry in his joints so that was my motivation.

Far right is a new crosscut carcass saw. All my shorter carcass/dovetail saws are rip so I needed a crosscut for things like tenons.

In the middle is a goose neck chisel for cleaning out the bottom of mortises.

Lastly on the left/bottom are some Veritas bench pups which give me another bench tool for keeping material in place while working that material.

If I head towards making guitars as I fantasized in a previous post, I expect that I will need a few additional tools but hopefully not many. Everytime I make a tool purchase means that I don’t have the funds to purchase wood for actual projects.

Mortise and Tenon Practice

glennth — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 23:27:16 +0000

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.

Mortise and Tenon

glennth — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 01:13:56 +0000

I decided that I should mix some Mortise and Tenon practice amidst my dovetail practice. The real reason, is that I have done machine cut mortise and tenon but not very well. Since this was a different technique given that I’m cutting them by hand, I was hopeful that I could do much better.

I used my new sharpened mortise chisels along with my new hand brace. I’ve read that some people do the mortise entirely by chisels and I’ve also read that some folks use brace and auger bits to get the bulk of material out. My first attempt at using the brace was a fail. I had a center line to center the bit on but my first attempt was off. It’s not really possible to put it back on center once a hole is started. My second attempt with the brace was better but still off. I used an awl to mark the center line and was only barely outside of the center. I suspect this second time was not keeping the brace level and plumb.

So after these two fails, I used just the chisel. WOW, that was the way to go. I was able to keep with in the lines and it didn’t take much effort to cut the mortise out. Of course, I’m getting really good at sharpening so I can attest that the chisel was very sharp. I followed the technique to ease up on the shoulder marks. Using this, the walls of the mortise were nice and square. I was very pleased. I did learn that a goose neck chisel would be very useful. I had a tough time cleaning out the bottom. I know the bottom doesn’t have to be as nice as the walls but I still wanted the mortise to it’s finished depth.

On to the tenon. I used the mortise to mark the tenon. I did my rip and crosscut cuts. I found though that I didn’t make one of my rip cuts deep enough and it caused me to go way to deep on a crosscut cut. Even with this, I tried the mortise and found it was fat (whew!) so I was able to pear it down to fit nice and snug. Though with the too deep of cut, the tenon broke off on the final fitting.

I will try and do this again and see if I can take some pictures for the next posting.