Part II – The Tenon
In continuation of Part I – The Mortise, found at: http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?t=13246
The tenon cheeks can be cut with the back saw, table saw and tenoning jig, band saw, or crosscut on the table saw using the stack dado set. It doesn’t much matter….just insure that you cut to the outside of your scribed lines for a slightly fat fit to be shaved down lightly with the shoulder plane. Why? Well, this especially applies to crosscutting with the dado set, but to a lesser extent applies to many saw cuts. Sawn surfaces aren’t perfectly clean…that fuzzy surface is composed of tiny bits of short grain most noticeable in crosscut tenons…and that short grain does not provide the high quality glue bond a cleaner, planed surface does. Yeah, I know, it’s a small point with today’s modern glues, but it’s a point worth remembering because it can still be overdone, especially by neatnicks using the minimum amount of glue to avoid cleaning squeeze out.
When using handsaws, tilting the workpiece away from you and beginning at a corner is the most efficient technique for hitting the outside edge of those lines on the first try.
I whip out the shop-made miter box to cut the shoulders square…
…rip the lower edge of the tenon and the unmitered section of the upper edge…
…and finish the miter using the dovetail saw. The more perfect my layout and saw cuts, the less plane work will be needed…but providing I remain outside those scribed lines, even my sloppiest cuts…and there are certainly some sloppy one here…can be easily planed to perfection.
The sawn tenon shoulders are brought into perfect alignment and the tenon cheeks and edges are shaved as necessary for snug fit. A feature I like in the Stanley #93 is it is ergonomically designed to be pulled as well as pushed…. because it is easier to keep your planed surface flat and square by alternating the direction of the plane when taking crossgrain shavings…and not having to reposition the work piece makes this technique very fast.
You can see from the relatively small pile of shavings that bringing the tenon from “won’t fit” through “drive fit” to “snug, heel-of-the-palm, hand fit” didn’t require much work. The edges of the tenon can be relatively loose compared to the tight cheeks, as chopping hard with that steep-beveled chisel has compressed the end grain at the ends of the mortise slightly…and they’ll swell back some as the humidity increases.
A technique I use on fine furniture I’m only demonstrating here is to pare the tenon shoulders inward from the edge slightly using a bench chisel. This insures a perfectly tight shoulder-post fit by removing any impediments in the tenon-shoulder corners.
Continued…