Log home big mortice question

[Scott Rollins]

A friend at work asked me about cutting a 4"X6"X3.5" deep mortice for the second floor joists of his log home. He needs to cut about 40 of these mortices and also 4 that are 12" long for the 4X12's. We have decided that a 3.5 " hole saw to hog out the bulk of the material, a circular saw (for the long sides) and some sort of router jig for the bottom and a lot of chiseling might suffice. To me this seems like a lot of work. He has a Plunge router, 16" makita circular saw, Prazi 12" beam cutter, and hand tools at his disposal. Does anyone out there have any better ideas?

[Joel Sloan]

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/11ahDe8%2BuGL.jpg (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002HC2VQ/ref=wl_itt_dp?ie=UTF8&coliid=I1PARM4RY08GZ4&colid=1U5E2IA863QUW)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002HC2VQ/ref=wl_itt_dp?ie=UTF8&coliid=I1PARM4RY08GZ4&colid=1U5E2IA863QUW

[Dan Barr]

chain mortiser would do it . there is a guy on here that has/had one of those for sale

here is the link: http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?t=68302&highlight=chain+mortiser


send him a PM and ask if its still for sale.

ciao,

dan

[Scott Rollins]

Wow that is a beast of a mortiser! I think that may be out of his budget, but I will ask. I wonder if you can rent one of those?

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Scott........some friends and I were riding horses in the wilderness here in Idaho. We came out of the wilderness at a historic fire lookout. What made this lookout special was that it was a log cabin with a stick built tower coming up out of the middle of the roof. There was a guy there, retired forest service engineer, replacing the bottom ground rotted logs of the log cabin. He was cutting the interlocking angles on the ends of the logs by hand with a giant chisel made for him by a retired engineer from NASA. The end of the chisel had specially hardened steel that once sharpened stayed that way for a significant time. A 2 lb. sledge and chisel. The guy was raising the entire building using opposing wedges and blocking it up. He wasn't a complete "neander and I use that term with respect"....He had a digital level with memory. He'd measure the two angles on each cut face of the existing log and store it in the memory. Then he'd replace the log and cut the faces to interlock with the log above.

Hope your friend finds an easy way of doing it.

[Bill Wyko]

Before I even looked at the sencond post, I thought about using a chainsaw to plunge cut the mortise. Looks like its already been invented:o