Gouges for joinery? Inside vs Outside Canneled

[Mike Holbrook]

I have been thinking about using a couple gouges to clean wood out of joints like mortises. It seems that gouges can sometimes remove wood faster without causing as much splitting/splintering. I am wondering if others use these tools for this work? I also see that there are two types of gouges and I am wondering why some have the bevel on the inside and some on the out? Is a V gouge sometimes useful to clean out corners on mortises & tenons or is a corner chisel always better? Is it helpful on mortises to have a good size corner chisel to form the corners with, or do Cranked, Swan-Neck, Fishtail, Skew or square sided Mortise chisels server just as well or better?

[Zach Dillinger]

A v gouge will be of little use cleaning out mortise corners. They are usually more acute than 90 degrees. I use in cannel gouges all the time to quickly remove large amounts of wood. I usually pare across the grain, much like you would use a fore plane while traversing a board.

Mortise chisels are my favorite way to make mortises, without drilling holes / paring the sides and corners. I really can't speak to the utility of the other chisels you mentioned for M + T work, since I never use them.

[Mike Holbrook]

So I am not crazy to use gouges for stock removal. I was thinking they might come in handy removing the excess wood on plane totes, saw handles too. I was thinking that a V or corner chisel might make a cleaner cut in corners, but I can see how a mortise chisel might do close to the same thing. I assume you are talking about square edged mortise chisels Zach, or does it matter? It also occurred to me that two slightly intersecting straight cuts might be the ticket. I'm sure there are several methods that work. I am just looking for the method which is the most accurate, least risky. Wood spitting and splintering is my main concern.

[Jack Curtis]

Gouges certainly come in handy for stock removal, in making chair seats, for example. I'm with Zach on using mortising chisels for making mortises, and also never need to pair the mortise sides. A corner chisel will spend more time in sharpening than will help in squaring.

[Jim Koepke]

Mortise chisels seem to be able to do almost all the work when I need to make a mortise. I will occasionally use a swan neck or lock mortise chisel on the bottom.

I am always careful not to have wood shavings jamming into my fingers when using a gouge. For stock removal, a plane makes more sense. A pretty hefty shaving can be removed with a plane set up for such. Of course there are a few situations where the gouge will work better like on a chair seat.

In cannel bevel gouges are not as easy to turn in a cut as an out cannel bevel. They are great for making an inside curve on the end of a molding strip. The gouge goes straight down and the bevel doesn't mar the cut. The bevel on the inside tends to make the gouge want to dig in.

Out cannel bevel gouges are good at making turns. The outside bevel helps to control the depth of cut.

For my gouges a small bevel is on the opposite side of the main bevel to help with control. More so on my in cannel gouges than on the out cannel gouges.

jtk

[Zach Dillinger]

The most accurate and least risky method for mortising is to lay out your mortise using a proper mortise chisel. You set your mortising gauge to exactly the width of your chisel, and then scribe your lines. Starting roughly in the middle of your proposed mortise, drive the chisel in, 1/16 or so. Move the chisel a small amount, do this again. Once you've cut into the whole surface (staying away from the top and bottom lines), pare with the mortise chisel (bevel down) carefully to remove the chips. Continue this until you have a shallow trench, exactly the size of your mortise layout. Then you can start driving the chisel in earnest, but don't drive the chisel into your stopping lines (i.e. top and bottom of the mortise). That should be done after you've removed the waste from the rest of the mortise, to ensure you have square ends. I like to work with the bevel leading and push the chips back towards the center of the mortise, this helps to wedge the chips out of the mortise and makes cleanout easier.

If you are working in thin stock, you can put a handscrew on the board to compress the wood slightly and make sure it doesn't blow out or split.

I don't think the drilling / paring / corner chisel method is particularly good for furniture sized mortises. You have to drill undersized, so that you have room to pare the sides flat, but that introduces the potential for error in the width of the mortise (i.e. paring too much / not enough). Of course, if you cut your tenons to fit your mortises, that doesn't really matter, but it is easy to pare too much of the front of the mortise, which could mean that a table apron / bed rail etc wouldn't be flush with the edge, or at least it wouldn't be where you want it to be. The drilling method also takes more time. I really only see a benefit for drilling mortises when you are dealing with mortises that are, say, 3/4" wide or more, which isn't something you usually deal with in furniture. I wouldn't want to try to drive a 3/4" wide or wider proper mortising chisel... you'd need linebackers arms for that.

[Jim Koepke]

I wouldn't want to try to drive a 3/4" wide or wider proper mortising chisel... you'd need linebackers arms for that.

I have been keeping a watch for a 3/4" mortise chisel in my price range. My walloping mallet don't need no linebacker arms.

jtk

[Zach Dillinger]

Good stuff, Jim. That's a beefy chisel to drive, walloping mallet or no walloping mallet!

[Mike Holbrook]

So say I need to make mortises for a new bench: 1 3/4 x 3 3/8, 5/8 x 3 1/2, 3 1/4 x 1, 2 3/4 x 5/8. Would you drill holes first then? I guess I could make multiple rows with a 5/8 or 3/4 mortise chisel. Maybe this is the place for a framing chisel and a big mallet, certainly much larger mortises have to be cut for framing? I see framing chisels 1 1/2 and even 2. I even see Firming chisels up to 1 1/2 but I was thinking these are used more often for cleaning up the sides of mortises or tenons rather than for chopping out the larger quantities of wood. Or back to the original question, is a large gouge a good alternative here?

[Bill Houghton]

I don't know if this is true of all of them, but at least some inside-cannel (the bevel on a gouge is traditionally called a cannel, no idea why) gouges are considered scribing gouges and are used when you want to pare a specific shape into a piece of stock. For instance, if you have a frame-and-panel door with quarter-round molding on the rails and stiles (that will "frame" the panel when the door is assembled), one method of doing the corners is to cut the molding straight on the rails and scribe the molding on the stiles to accept the rail molding (so the stile molding will have a quarter-circle cut out of it at each rail joint). A scribing gouge was used for this paring. I would imagine you could use it for any similar paring purposes.

As a stock removal tool, an inside-cannel gouge would be terrible, as it would dive into the wood and wouldn't give good leverage for removing the wood (imagine using a chisel bevel-up when trying to remove stock).

[Zach England]

I have always wanted to figure out a way to cut curved dovetails--at least a way other than a crazy router jig or impossible skill with a coping saw. Maybe matching in-cannel and out-cannel gouges? Has something like this already been done? Or has it never been done for good reason?

[Jim Koepke]

Here are a couple of posts on such:

http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?102048

I don't know if Roy used gouges for his work.

http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?95360


I know on mine gouges were used.

The FWW article that gave me the idea used a router to cut different shapes.

jtk

[Ryan Baker]

Both in-cannel and out-cannel gouges are useful tools for a variety of jobs, but cleaning out rectangular mortices isn't one of them. That just doesn't make any sense. It wouldn't save anything, and you would still have to pare the mortise with a flat chisel later anyway.

For small mortices, I would use a mortise chisel. For larger mortices it is probably more efficient to drill and pare. A normal paring chisel will quickly produce nice square corners with good technique. A corner chisel isn't needed, except maybe as a luxury if you cut mortises all day.

[Ryan Griffey]

I don't use a corner chisel for hardwoods. However, for timber framing with woods like douglas fir I like to use a large corner chisel. Douglas fir prefers to splinter rather than seperate cleanly.

With that said if you buy some gouges you will find plenty of use for them. Mine are vintage and for certain tasks they are indespensable. Sharpening is a bit of a pain on the in-cannel variety. I don't use the in-cannel gouges much. Mostly at low angles on end grain.

[Joshua Clark]

Incannell gouges are indeed good for coping or scribing. I never realized how versitile they were until I noticed that Roy Underhill uses them frequently on his show for all sort of paring operations. It gave me new insights into their usefulness.

Josh

[Jim Koepke]

Incannell gouges are indeed good for coping or scribing.

If I want to make a round bead for an eye or such, a gouge set on the wood and then turned will scribe a good circle.

jtk

[Mike Holbrook]

What size gouges do you guys find most useful? I would like to make chairs at some point and want to make those nice sculpted seats, so I imagine a nice big one would be nice.

[Bryan Schwerer]

I got Jim Tolpin's New Traditional Woodworker for Christmas. He recommends having a shallow gouge for heavy stock removal. IIRC, it was more for dadoes and rabbits than mortises. I do need to pick up a couple though. I think he recommended cranked for dadoes.