Mortises - whats your method ?

[Howie French]

I am wondering how most people make their mortises.

1. by hand
2. router / jig
3. dedicated mortiser

I am trying to determine what the benefits/drawbacks are
between using a router and bench mortiser.

If you use a router, what have you found to be an effective jig ?

Howie

[Jamie Buxton]

Plunge router. It produces smoother faces than hand-chiseling, so there's a better glue joint. It is fast. And unlike a dedicated mortiser, it isn't a single-purpose device eating space in the workshop.

I use a shop-built jig very rarely. Mostly I just use the edge-guide. Layout consists of two pencil line -- a start line and a stop line.

[Howie French]

Jamie, do you use a traditional tenon or loose, if traditional I assume you square the mortise up with a chisel ?

[Ellen Benkin]

1. Drill press to get most of the wood out and then a chisel to square it up.

2. Horizontal slot mortiser or multirouter to get most of the wood out and then a chisel to square it up.

3. Mortising machine with chisel/bit attachment.

All of these systems work, and I'm most comfortable with the horizontal slot mortiser because I've used it most often.

[Chris Jenkins]

Looks like Jamie and I have the same methods. Normally a plunge router equipped with an edge guide. Then I clean it up with a good sharp chisel.

As far as jigs go I have only made one for a custom size once. That is the downfall to some of the jigs, they are only good for one specific application. Unless I know I may make the same project again in the future or I have many idientical parts, I usually skip the jig.

A dedicated mortiser is a cool machine and can bang them out ASAP, but it is a machine that can only be used for one specific use. Unless you swear by M & T joints then it may not be worth spending the money on that. Epsicailly if you could take that money and put it towards... Say a Drill press. Which you could setup a mortise jig on (Delta usually gives this away free with purchase). But if you don't want to use that, a good brad point bit can do most of the work a mortiser can, then you just clean it up with a chisel. And when you're done, you still have a DP that can do lots of things, versus the dedicated mortiser.

[Steve Beadle]

The method I use to make a mortise depends on the size and depth of the mortise and also on how many I need to make. If it is a relatively deep mortise, I will generally use a combination of the drill press and bench chisels. If it's relatively shallow, I will use the router table. It's also fun to chop out a mortise with a mortising chisel from beginning to end, but I only have one size of mortising chisel at present. If I have a lot of mortises to make, I try to jig it up, either on the drill press or on the router table.

Steve

[Dick Latshaw]

Here's the setup I use. Router with edge guide with the work held by wedges.

49388

A closer look without the router. I have stop blocks for the edge guide and the work.

49389

[Cliff Rohrabacher]

Slots and lose tenons

[pat warner]

Can be routed . (http://patwarner.com/router_morticing.html)

[Jim Becker]

My answer is "yes"...all of those methods. 'Depends upon the project.

[Jim Young]

I used to use the router with a home made fixture (Router Magic by Bill Hylton). Now I have a dedicated mortiser but still on occasion use my mallot and chisels.

[Gary Keedwell]

I have a bench mortiser that I modified. Works great and it cost less then what I paid for my Festool cordless drill! I know the tests results say that a router finish is stronger but I don't let elephants sit on my furniture so it is a non-issue.
Also, I have two routers that I only use as a last resort. I have issues with the noise, dust ,wood chips, danger, and spending 3/4ths of my precious time making fixtures.
But that is just me. To each his own. LOML and I are big fans of Arts & Crafts furniture so it did not take long for my mortiser to pay for itself.
Gary K.

[Doug Shepard]

I've got a dedicated mortiser but dont use it all that much anymore. I like the cleaner walls from using a router better. So mostly it's plunge router with a MicroFence edge guide. I've done both the tenon rounding and mortise squaring methods. No real favorite there, just whatever seems right at the time. I've got some heavier Record mortising chisels that do a pretty good job if I go with square holes.

[Jamie Buxton]

Jamie, do you use a traditional tenon or loose, if traditional I assume you square the mortise up with a chisel ?

I only square up the mortise if it is a through-mortise. Otherwise I leave it round-ish at the end. What holds a mortise-and-tenon together is the glue on the cheeks.

I say "squarish" because for much of my joints, I cut the mortise first, and do it with two passes of the router. The first pass is with the edge guide on one face of the board, and the second pass is the with edge guide on the other face. This assures that the mortise is exactly centered. I cut the tenon to fit. If it is a traditional tenon, I cut the cheeks on the table saw, with the workpiece upright. Again, I cut a cheek, then flip the workpiece to hold the other face against the fence, assuring that the tenon is in the middle of the workpiece.

I generally use traditional tenons on simple joints -- ones that meet at ninety degrees. I generally use loose tenons on joints which meet at weird angles.

[Jamie Buxton]

Here's the setup I use. Router with edge guide with the work held by wedges.

49388



I used to use a jig like that -- came from Tage Frid's books, right? -- but I don't any more. I just put the workpiece down on the bench, generally clamped somehow, and rout away. The router and the edge guide ride directly on the workpiece. In this approach, there's some hazard of rocking the router on a narrow workpiece. A fix is to back the workpiece with something which is exactly the same height as the workpiece. As it happens, that's easy. Generally, the workpiece has a symmetrical twin -- another piece of wood which is exactly the same shape as the one you're routering on. It is just sitting there on your bench waiting to be used. Eliminating the jig means that there's fewer things kicking around your bench, and there's no loss of accuracy.

[Doug Shepard]

... A fix is to back the workpiece with something which is exactly the same height as the workpiece. As it happens, that's easy. Generally, the workpiece has a symmetrical twin -- another piece of wood which is exactly the same shape as the one you're routering on. It is just sitting there on your bench waiting to be used. Eliminating the jig means that there's fewer things kicking around your bench, and there's no loss of accuracy.

I do the same thing. There's a few other benefits too. Assuming you keep them clamped together through all the operations, you only really have to do the layout lines on one of the pieces. Same goes for setting stop blocks as long as it spans both pieces.

[Scott Vigder]

I've been using a benchtop mortiser for about a year now, and I still amaze visitors by showing them the machine that drills square holes.
I build mostly tables, chairs & desks in the Arts and Crafts style, so I can easily drill 50-60 holes to accept spindles on a single project. The benchtop (mine's the General- I liked it's fence better than the others) bangs these puppies out in no time. I rarely have any clean out or trimming of the hole.
It boils down to 1) shop space (not an issue for me) 2) comfort with the machine (routers demand relentless respect) and 3) style of construction (square holes for mission styles save time with spindles placement). Good luck, this is a fun decision to make.

[Mark Singer]

I now have a slot mortiser on my MM Elite S... A router works well if guided by a jig or thr Festool Rail. I also have a motorized chisel mortiser... It really depends on the application. Loose tenons are a very good way to go! The work is clean and there is less fussing with shoulders and cheeks...sometimes if the project comes out nice I still get kisses on the cheeks or an occasional pat on the shoulder:rolleyes:

[Allen Bookout]

I just built an exterior cabinet to hold hurricane shutters that needed to be strong enought to stand up to hurricane force winds so was using very heavy material. It had a ton of mortise and tenon joints and I did most of them, where the depth allowed, with a plunge router and a Pat Warner jig. The problem is that the router method really limits the depth and even when it was not a problem it seemed to me that I spent a lot of unnecessary time either squaring the mortises or rounding the tenons. The same problem of time using a drill press for the deeper ones not to mention the extra time if any through joints had been required.

This project ticked me off so much that this last Monday I ordered a floor standing Yorkcraft mortiser from Wilke and it is heading this way now and should arrive Friday. I am thinking that this just has to be a better way to get the job done.

As far as space goes, I am going to put it on rollers and it will not take up any more space than my drill press.

To bad that this thread was not started a week from now and I could let you know what I think after I try it out. If there is still some activity here I will post a reply. Otherwise I will try to remember to start a new thread with some of my thoughts.

Allen

[John Stevens]

I used to use a router with a jig I made. It makes both the mortise and the tenon. It can also make sliding dovetails. For what it's worth, a couple of pics of the first version are below. Then I made another version with a better method for clamping the work pieces to the jig, but I don't have pics handy.

But that was before I got my Lamello biscuit joiner. Now I think long and hard before I make mortise and tenon joints...other than biscuit joints, which are a type of floating M&T. Since I bought the Lamello two years ago, I haven't yet failed to think of a way that I couldn't design my projects to use biscuit joints instead of M&T joints.

[David Rose]

What? No one with a Leigh FMT besides me? :o

For some reason, everything I have built wanted mortises and tenons. From the first saw horses on, I needed them. When I started, I built a router fixture for every different setup. It didn't take long to find out that the fixtures were taking much more time than the projects. So I tried a couple of projects on the drill press with forstners and chisels. Then I went to the horizontal router, which worked pretty well and was fairly easy to set up. I had dedicated an old dying Stanley to that, and the table was built for the router. :( So when it finally died, I built the Bill Hylton mortiser with a couple of stop changes. That one also worked fairly well, but I found it tedious to get good clean shoulders on the tenons. Also, for some reason, tenon shoulders on my router table almost always had a little glitch somewhere. I tried several methods of holding the work but usually got one little error somewhere.

Then LOML came up with three projects in a row that needed lots of mortises and tenons. Many of these were in face frames, so I started searching for a more fool proof way to cut them. The Leigh FMT looked really good but the price was high for my little shop. After a considerable amount of time on the phone with Leigh trying to find a "dented" or damaged or rejected tool, I became convinced that it was the best tool ever built. Try talking to "the man himself" at Leigh for a time and see if you don't come away as convinced as he is. :eek: :p He answered every question and gave me more ideas than the most excellent and complete manual (his, of course) in the industry could offer. He even challenged me to come up with better ideas for a couple of my more serious concerns. I did. He incorporated them! And offered the parts at no charge when they went into production. Of course, he had my blessing on this as he produced them and shipped them to anyone who wanted them. I considered that a win for us both besides being a bit of an ego boost. :rolleyes:

I can now produce tenon after tenon without error and in many configurations. Mortises are fast and clean. No more rounding tenons or squaring mortises or loose tenons or "square pegs in round holes". It is designed to do face frames, but it will handle legs and such also.

Good grief! I'm sounding like a Leigh salesman! :eek: I guess their satisfied customers are their best salesmen. And I don't even have a Leigh dovetail jig... yet. :rolleyes: I don't dare call back or email questions on that one!

I don't work fast, so I may never "pay" for the machine, but satisfaction and ease makes me feel that the work has paid for it.

David, a sucker who can fall for a really really good, honest sales pitch :eek:

[Ron Blaise]

Router and mostly dedicated Shop Fox mortiser. Even by hand at times (before I bought Mortiser). But, my hands ain't what they used to be so good tools help. Just my 2 cents.

[Phil Pritchard]

A dedicated mortiser is a cool machine and can bang them out ASAP, but it is a machine that can only be used for one specific use.

Well, I use a Multico MCD square chisel mortiser. It has a moving head arrangement and an drop away, tilting table so angled mortises are a doddle. The drop away table means that I can mortise out a lock recess in a made-up door - which I find a useful capacity to have. I have over the years purchased a drill chuck conversion for my MCD, which means it can drill as well, and a multi-hole drilling head (7 drill) which means I can gang drill carcasses, end drill rails for dowels, etc. Multico also do hinge boring heads/inserters for all the common Euro hinges - Blum, Hettich and Salice - although I didn't buy the head as I already owned a hinge borer and insertr. So not quite a single-purpose machine and it certainly earnd its space in the shop


Unless you swear by M & T joints then it may not be worth spending the money on that. Epsicailly if you could take that money and put it towards... Say a Drill press. Which you could setup a mortise jig on (Delta usually gives this away free with purchase).

Chris, I think that you've never needed to do any quantity of traditional joinery work. The mortise and tenon joint is pivotal to most traditional quality joinery, such as frame and panel doors. That jig on a drill press is clumsy, innacurate, slow to use and inconvenient. A true mortiser has an X-Y axis moving table (or in the case of the Multico a fixed table with a moving mortising/drilling head). That table gives you accuracy and repeatability. The table stops mean that you only need to mark out the mortises on a single rail if you are making a batch of doors and means that all the mortises you subsequently cut will be identical lengths, widths and depths, something difficult to achieve on a drill press set-up. Then a good quality mortiser has an additional feature - table end stops and/or extension stops. These work in the same way that the flip-over stops used on a radial arm saw or a panel saw sliding carraige do and mean that you can set-up to do the three or four mortises on a door rail once and all the subsequent mortises will be in the exact same places. If you are doing just a single door it makes little sense do go through ths rigmarole, but if you are doing 3 or 4 house doors, or a complete kitchen full of mortised and tenon doors it is not only a huge time saver, but much more accurate than any other technique. And that's the thing about the mortise and tenon joint, you rarely see to need one, more often you need a dozen - even a simple 4-panel door requires ten.

Phil

[Howie French]

thanks everyone for your thoughts, I appreciate hearing everyones's experiences. one last question for router users... spiral bits or regular straigth bits ?

thanks, Howie

[Allen Bookout]

I like the sprial upcut bits but I think that Pat Warner has a different take on the subject. Check his website at the link listed below. He has a great deal of information there and is a real expert.

http://www.patwarner.com/

I just checked and here is the page:

http://www.patwarner.com/router_morticing.html

[Burt Waddell]

Here is a method that is very popular with a lot of EZ Smart users.


http://eurekazone.com/gallery/How-to-make-a-mortise-and-tenon-system (http://eurekazone.com/gallery/How-to-make-a-mortise-and-tenon-system)

http://eurekazone.com/albums/How-to-make-a-mortise-and-tenon-system/ezcatalog_361.jpg (http://sawmillcreek.org/)http://eurekazone.com/gallery/images/pixel_trans.gifhttp://eurekazone.com/gallery/images/pixel_trans.gif
(javascript:Help('http://us.rd.yahoo.com/mail_us/help/?http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/context/context-71.html'))

[Nancy Laird]

Am I the only one around who owns a Woodtek Matchmaker? That puppy will make mortises, cut tenons, make box joints, and a lot of other stuff. Just don't use it for dovetails--the Leigh jig is better. It takes a while to set up, but you will never have to clean out your mortises and fit each M&T joint then mark it.

If anyone is interested in more information, please PM me (can't post a link to the retailer).

Nancy

[Allen Bookout]

Am I the only one around who owns a Woodtek Matchmaker?
If anyone is interested in more information, please PM me (can't post a link to the retailer).

Nancy

That is very interesting. I have not seen that machine but would like to see what it will do just out of curiosity. To bad that they do not have an online video. I am all set up but I might order the video anyway. The cost appears to be a little steep considering what a pretty good floor standing mortiser cost but if it does enough other things it might be worth it.

Here is the link for those of you that are interested:

http://woodworker.com/cgi-bin/FULLPRES.exe?PARTNUM=95-201&LARGEVIEW=ON

[Mark Singer]

The Matchmaker looks a bit like a Multi Router.....lots of acessories to buy if you wish....

[Paul Simmel]

An upcut spiral bit under the table, a high fence, drop the stick down at the starting mark, push to the finish mark, lift stick.

[John Fry]

What? No one with a Leigh FMT besides me? :o
I'm with ya on this David, I have one, use it whenever I can, and I love it.

[David Rose]

Yay! I knew there had to be at least one more of us. It is an impressive tool, isn't it?

David


I'm with ya on this David, I have one, use it whenever I can, and I love it.

[Dave Richards]

Of course there's always the WoodRat. And you can safely make climb cuts for the tenons so the shoulders are breakout free.

[Phil Pritchard]

And just how do you make a 4in deep through mortise in a door stile with a Woodrat?

Phil

[Dave Richards]

Phil, how would you do that with any router?

Quit scrit picking. ;) Must be a slow day.

Why not pick on the FMT for that? Or any of the hand held router-based jigs?

I bet you've got a machine in your shop that can do that. On the other hand, I probably don't have as much money invested in my entire shop as you have in a couple of machines. I only do it as a hobby.

[Phil Pritchard]

Hi Dave

I was taught how to mortise with an brace and bit and mortise chisels. I moved onto a square chisel mortoiser, then a chain mortiser and I've also worked with Alternax and Maka oscillating/swing chisel types. It all depends on what you are doing your mortises for. For cabinetwork a router, Woodrat, small slot mortiser, etc will do just fine - but, and it's a big but, they are all grossly inadequate when it comes to doing joinery depth mortises as you would on house doors, etc (and a 4-panel door has 10 mortises). A square chisel mortiser can, however, do small scale work, a router can't do large scale work. All I was trying to do was make that point - size and scale are important.

Phil

[Dave Richards]

That's all good but why pick on the WoodRat?

[glenn bradley]

Spiral, of course. They're not that much more $$ and they cut sweet.

[Phil Pritchard]

That's all good but why pick on the WoodRat?
Not particularly the Woodrat, although from memory (I've had a Woodrat) the router is already positioned 10 or 12mm (3/8 to 1/2in) above the surface of the timber which reduces the depth of the mortise even more than a plunge router with two fences. Horses for courses, that's all Dave

Phil

[Kirk Poore]

Hi Dave

I was taught how to mortise with an brace and bit and mortise chisels. I moved onto a square chisel mortoiser, then a chain mortiser and I've also worked with Alternax and Maka oscillating/swing chisel types. It all depends on what you are doing your mortises for. For cabinetwork a router, Woodrat, small slot mortiser, etc will do just fine - but, and it's a big but, they are all grossly inadequate when it comes to doing joinery depth mortises as you would on house doors, etc (and a 4-panel door has 10 mortises). A square chisel mortiser can, however, do small scale work, a router can't do large scale work. All I was trying to do was make that point - size and scale are important.

Phil

I agree, Phil, that size and scale are important. Sometimes some of us tend to overdo it:

http://owwm.com/PhotoIndex/Images/2482-A.JPG

My Greenlee 227 autofeed mortiser sure is fun to use, but it's really overkill most of the time. Ah, well, it only cost a thousand bucks (not counting chisel sets & phase converter.). If I just have a couple of mortises to do, I fall back on mortising chisel and sometimes drillpress.

Kirk Poore

[Dewayne Baker]

I built this jig.

49607

Featured in woodsmith magazine issue 68. Works great and sure makes mortise and loose tenon joinery a snap

[Ted Miller]

Sometimes some of us tend to overdo it:


Exactly what my wife says to me often about buying tools, but when it comes to doors and I do alot of them, a floor mortiser is a must, I guess I am getting lazy in my old age...

[Jerry Olexa]

There are many ways to do this. For years, I used the plunge router using a makeshift jig for guidance. About a year ago, I bought a Jet mortiser and other than testing on scraps, haven't used on a project yet...I frankly think the router will do a better job

[John Gornall]

Just think - if mortise and tenon were visible like dovetails, proud woodworkers would have to cut them all by hand and projects would take twice as long.