Quote:
Originally Posted by Randy Henry
I guess I'm not quite understanding #3. I'm making a small coffee table with 3" apron that will be attached to the legs by m/t with 3/4 material. If I started the mortise at twice the thickness of the apron from the top of the leg which is 1 1/2", there is no way I could get the width of the tenon. I thought the top shoulder on the tenon should be the same as the sides.
Randy, you don't need a shoulder on the top of the tenon, but reducing the length of the top, say, 3/4" of the tenon so that it's just a short stub tenon (a haunch) both insures against blowing out the top of the mortise by lever action against the leg's end grain, while also providing resistance to the rail's twisting that might occur if you entirely removed that much of the tenon. A minimal shoulder at the bottom of the tenon helps hide the mortise.
Google "haunched tenon" and you'll get lots of hits which explain and illustrate the idea. Note: some writers, esp. Brits, call any tenon that doesn't go all the way through a "stub" tenon; for our purposes, a stub tenon is short (like 1/2" - 3/4"), much shorter than a normal tenon.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Russell Johnson
So I'm confused. If I have a 3/4" apron member going into a 2" leg would 1/2" or so mortise be ok?
If the face of the rail is going to be flush with the front face of the leg, then you'd want at least a 1/4" shoulder/cheek on the outer side of the mortise and tenon, so with 3/4" material a 1/2" thick tenon (that's what you meant, right?) would be too thick, there'd be no back shoulder to the tenon.
A lot of times, though, the rails are set back from the face of the legs, which not only looks better, IMO, but it allows a thicker tenon, for strength, plus a wider (thicker) outer cheek to the mortise; the tenon shoulders don't need to be any particular depth, as long as there is some shoulder on both sides of the tenon, and sometimes in fact you can offset the tenon, giving a deeper shoulder on one side but still having at least a minimal shoulder on the other.
It's really with like-sized frame members that the 1/3 rule for tenon thickness is most appropriate -- you want a thick enough tenon to have some strength, but you also need thick enough mortise cheeks to be strong enough.