You might have read a couple of posts I had related to finding the right mortising bits for my Mini Max mortiser. I tried a long Amana bit but it grabbed too much and had too much run out leaving a rough oversized mortise. It felt down right dangerous in my machine. Based on advise here I bought a shorter 2 flute center cutting end mill. Just perfect results up to the full cutting depth of about 1-5/8" on the 3/4" diameter bit.

That exercise was an effort to help my friend who's building a dining room table and needed to make about 30 or 40 mortises in the pedestal bases. Yesterday he brought his beautifully prepped mahogany stock over and we cut all the mortises. He's using loose tenons so we had to cut mortises in both long grain and end grain. The mortises came out beautiful; nice smooth side walls and all the same width. All the mortises were 1-9/16" deep and range from about 1-1/4" to 3-1/2" wide. He has a chisel mortiser and had contemplated using traditional mortise and tenon joints but he was happy he decided to go with loose tenons and my horizontal mortiser after he saw the first couple of mortises we made.

The Mini Max mortiser (FS 35) is a very robust platform and does its job well, but it has some downright dumb design features. The hold down clamp limits what could be an even greater travel range because it bangs into the fence assembly. The lateral and depth adjustments are under the table and very awkward and finicky to use. The work stop is comprised of two short pieces of steel with a gap in the middle rather than one long stop. That makes working with narrow pieces a challenge unless you add a supplemental fence, and I plan to change it to one long stop made out of aluminum. We joked that it looked like the mortiser was designed after a long Italian lunch and by the newby engineer. But we also both remarked that we would not have wanted to make those big mortises another way. I bought the FS35 because I wanted a wider J/P. The mortiser just happened to come with it. I'm now realizing I got a great bonus in the deal.

John