What cut this mortise?

[Wes Billups]

Found an interesting thing this weekend. Six years ago my wife and I renovated a home built in 1898. I kept all of the excess woodwork and one door from this renovation. I've been storing this door for the last six years waiting to find a use for it. This weekend I decided to cut it down to 48" tall for a small closet under our basement stairs. In the process of cutting it down, I was surprised to find each rail was mortised into the stiles 2-1/2 inches.

What's got me confused is the method used to cut the mortise. Does anyone know what kind of tool would have been used to cut mortises 100 years ago? Based on the machine marks it looks like some type of chain mortiser but I have to say I've never seen anything like this in today's tool catalogs.

Wes

[bob hertle]

looks like a chainsaw mortiser cut that

[george wilson]

I agree.I had a chance last year to buy a old,but condition wise nearly new Powermatic chain mortiser.It had a 1" X 1/4" chainsaw in it. I didn't want to have to buy the bits,and am not sure if they are available. It was only $500.00.

[Prashun Patel]

Those marks look suspiciously like the bottoms of a router bit.

Perhaps it was hand drilled with a spade bit?

[Wes Billups]

I should have stated I sawed the mortise in half to get the image you see in my post. I'm guessing it was a chain mortiser like others have stated as the bottom of the mortise is rounded. It appears to be a 1" radius.

[Vince Shriver]

Wes, that's interesting. Is that as far as the tenon went into the mortise?

[John Schreiber]

Could it be that the door isn't as old as the house? Chain mortiser is the only thing which looks likely to me.

[Kirk Poore]

Could it be that the door isn't as old as the house? Chain mortiser is the only thing which looks likely to me.
Chain mortisers have been available for a very long time. I have seen them in pre-1920 catalogs--my 1919 Hall & Brown catalog has one. It wouldn't surprise me to find out that they dated to the late 19th century, but I don't know that for sure. I think the Greenlee hollow chisel mortiser patents were still good in the 1890's, so there was incentive for somebody to invent something to get around them.

Kirk

[Harry Goodwin]

I wouldn't have a prayer concerning the one pictured but my grandfather made his own sash and doors years ago and in his shop he had one that was foot operted and had one chisel like bit that he used to make mortises. I think maybe he could rotate the bit on his to get a square mortise. He made a lot of window sash with it. Harry

[Wes Billups]

Vince, yes the mortise only went to that depth. Based on where I cut, all of the tenons went this deep.

John, I'm guessing the doors were all original as the house had very little work done to it prior to us gutting it. All of the doors and woodwork were unpainted and in pretty much original shape, other than the doors had been planed out of square to account for the settling that had occurred over the years. I ended up squaring up every door and rebuilding the jambs since we jacked up the house to level.

One interesting thing about this house was we found gobs of plane shavings inside the walls behind the lath. You could see where a carpenter had gone through the house and hand planed the studs to make them all flush with each other. Can you imagine seeing a carpenter/framer do this today?

[Bill Houghton]

One interesting thing about this house was we found gobs of plane shavings inside the walls behind the lath. You could see where a carpenter had gone through the house and hand planed the studs to make them all flush with each other. Can you imagine seeing a carpenter/framer do this today?

Good building practice still calls for lining the walls to get them flush up and down and along the wall, but nowadays, it's done by cutting the studs and gusseting them at the cut with plywood, or something similar.

Remember that, back then, the studs were more than somewhat uneven in width, even over the length of a stud. On our house, the carpenters lined up the studs at the exterior, and made up the difference on the interior by a more or less thick coat of plaster.

[Neal Clayton]

if your house were stucco on the outside like mine they didn't even need to do that ;). the plasterer could level both sides on his own.

the studs in my 1908 house are quite rough, and quite a few of them not even nearly straight.

but yeah it was the job of the plasterer to make the wall flat, not the carpenter.

harry, there's a PBS video of a tour of an old sash making company in the northeast that's using salvaged/rebuilt steam drive power tools. it's pretty interesting to see how easily those old (and very specific) tools can do things that require such annoying router jigs these days.

lemme see if i can find it...

edit: here you go..
http://flash.unctv.org/woodwrightss/wws_2612.html

[Frank Drew]

Chain mortisers have been available for a very long time. I have seen them in pre-1920 catalogs--my 1919 Hall & Brown catalog has one. It wouldn't surprise me to find out that they dated to the late 19th century, but I don't know that for sure. I think the Greenlee hollow chisel mortiser patents were still good in the 1890's, so there was incentive for somebody to invent something to get around them.

Kirk

William W. Green, of Chicago, obtained a patent for a chainsaw mortiser in 1877; might have been the first; hollow chisel mortisers had been introduced some decades before, I think.