Mortising with a Shopsmith?

[Greg Urwiller]

Does anyone use a Shopsmith to mortise? I've seen a couple of references on other sites where people have used theirs for mortising. Work? Greg

[Bill Space]

There is a Shopsmith forum where you can probably find answers and advice regarding your question:

https://www.shopsmith.com/ss_forum/

Seems like there are not many Shopsmith owners here.

Bill

[Greg Urwiller]

I always thought this would make a great horizontal mortiser. I've got a regular mortiser but I really don't like how it works. I made a router mortiser from Shopnotes, it's ok but not perfect. I've considered making a horizontal mortiser so I could go to loose tenons. Seems like that's a better route....maybe, maybe not. But I'd like to build one to try it. Thought that the way a SS worked that it would be easy to set one up to try. There were a couple Shopsmiths on a local auction today that I thought I'd watch, had to leave for a half hour, when I got back found out the autioneer had jumped ahead and sold a bunch of tools. Of course the SS's were included. Went for $200/225! Too bad, they were in great shape. Oh well, just thought I'd play!

[Bill Space]

Well, as much as I hate to admit it, I have three Shopsmiths at the moment, between my main house and the house next door that I am renovating.

The horizontal boring feature is super. The disc sander is good. The drill press feature for woodworking is excellent. The lathe is maybe OK.

The table saw is fearful and something I would never use.

Two are gray, one is green. Most I ever paid was $200, for a gray one (newer) and it included two 11" bandsaws.

Don't know about using a mortisind attachment.

Go to that link I referenced. You will get your answer there. 👍

Bill

[Jim Andrew]

Grizzly sells a horizontal boring machine that works well as a slot mortiser. Has stops so you can set it up to do multiple cuts. G0540

[Charles Lent]

You will get much cleaner mortises using a router and router bit, because of the higher bit speed. I have a Shop Smith, but it's the older Magnus Co. Model 510 version. It makes a good beginner's lathe and since I do about one lathe project every 2 years it has been adequate. I've used it for horizontal boring twice and it hasn't impressed me. I too, would never use it as a table saw. I have two good drill presses, so never use it for that.

For mortise and tenon work I have a Leigh FMT Pro jig and I couldn't be happier with the results that I get. It's expensive, but worth every penny if you do a lot of mortise and tenon work. The key feature of the Leigh FMT Pro and their Super FMT jig version is the adjustment on them that lets you fine tune the joint fit in thousandths of an inch. With this adjustment you can make the joint fit together so perfectly that a dry fit will slide together, but pop like a pop gun when you pull the joint apart, or fit a few thousandths looser to allow room for the glue, and it's incredibly repeatable. It's also nice to have a tool that lets you cut both the mortise and the matching tenon using just one setup and one bit. I bought my FMT jig when I was facing the need to cut over 1650 M & T joints. The FMT jig paid for itself several times over on just that one job.

Charley