Larger mortise bit set for mortising machine

[Clarence Martin]

Is there any company that makes larger sized Mortising chisle/ bit sets for mortising machines ? Looking to make a 7 day pill box out of Maple and would like to bore the square holes with the Mortising Machine, but can only find 5/8 " bits. Is there any place that makes 1" 1 1/2" and 2 " mortise bit sets ?

[Ole Anderson]

ou would need one heck of a mortising machine to push anything bigger than a 5/8" chisel into the wood bored out by the rotating bit. Just take several swipes with a smaller bit and clean them up with a chisel. There may be better ways to make a 7 day pill box, but I will leave that for others to comment on.

[Mike Henderson]

You could also drill out the holes, maybe with a Forstner bit, and then clean the corners up with a chisel. Or just go with round holes instead of square holes. There's nothing that says that containers for pills have to be square.

Mike

[Stephen Cherry]

Router and pattern. An onsrud pin router could knock these out mighty quick.

[Matt Day]

Or make multiple cuts with the smaller bit. KISS

[Thomas Canfield]

What are you doing about the rough bottom of the mortised hole? Do you drill a piece deeper than required and then cut off the bottom and glue to another section? Just curious as to your plan.

[Gary Radice]

Clico makes them up to 1 inch. Forest City used to make them up to one inch but I believe they have stopped production. I think Greenlee and maybe Forest City used to make larger ones, like 1.25 or 1.5 inch that may still be available on auction sites. I don't recall ever seeing one at 2 inches. Try calling Woodworker's Toolworks. They can tell you for sure whether such a thing exists.

[Peter Quinn]

Regardless of tooling this seems to me ill advised. You will have very weak short grain in at least one direction, and it will be very difficult go actually get the pills out of a square bottom mortised hole. Take a look at a cheap plastic pill box. They typically have a radiused bottom in the front to back direction. You could recreate that functionality easily with wood, just not one big hogged out chunk. Make a four sided frame, make a divisions with 1/8" strips of wood, make a miniature cove molding, cut into short pieces to line the bottom of each slot. Glue on a bottom, make a top, small hinges. Like a little jewelry box of sorts. It will be IMO much stronger and more functional.

[Lloyd McKinlay]

Lee Valley has them to 1". http://www.leevalley.com/US/Wood/page.aspx?p=53252&cat=1,180,42240,53317&ap=1

[Keith Hankins]

Is there any company that makes larger sized Mortising chisle/ bit sets for mortising machines ? Looking to make a 7 day pill box out of Maple and would like to bore the square holes with the Mortising Machine, but can only find 5/8 " bits. Is there any place that makes 1" 1 1/2" and 2 " mortise bit sets ?

You don't say what size machine you have. I have the powermatic 719T and I have the full bit set even the 1" monster bit. I bought it as part of a package deal with woodcraft. The full 4 piece set that was up through the 3/4" bit and the big guy 1". Now lets talk about using the bit. I bought it for morticing bed rails for pencil post beds . The torque required for that big bit is tremendous. The first one I cut with the big bit, but found that was just too much. I dropped back to the 3/4 and had much better luck and would feed one side of the mortice flip it around and do the other side. Which is easy if you have x/y adjustable table for your mortiser. Anyway another tip, clean out as much of the meat with a DP to make it easy, and invest in a sharpening cone and work the inside and outside of the chisel to make it easy to cut. None of them come ready to go out of the box.