I have taken three different courses in which mortises and tenons ( straight and tapered) needed to be made for: chair legs, spindles, chair rungs. Peter Galbert turned some tenons on a lathe, drilled straight sided angled ones with a special drill bit (elongated Brad-Point) and designed a special wooden tapered reamer (with metal adjustable blade) for converting straight sided holes to tapered holes. Schwarz used Veritas Tapered Tenon Cutters, operated by hand like a pencil sharpener, with a straight blade producing a tapered tenon for the tenons. He drilled straight holes for mortises at the appropriate angle with either a brace or a drill press and jig. He tapered the holes using a Lee Valley Large Standard Reamer. Drew Langsner used a lathe and antique specially modified reamers. Like Schwarz and Galbert he drilled angled holes with a straight drill bit first and then reamed the taper in those holes requiring it.
I want to make my own Windsor Chairs now. I was hoping to find ways to make legs and rungs and the joints to attach them to chairs with hand tools. The Schwarz class actually made sawbenches, but the legs were made like Windsor legs with hand tools. The class also used the same Windsor methods for laying out, drilling and reaming the holes to accept the sawbench legs. I took the Schwarz class hoping that I would learn hand tool methods for this work. Schwarz started out using a brace to drill with and hand planes to taper legs and turn them into octagons. A brace actually turns out to be a little easier to line up on a sight line or resultant angle than a bit in an electric drill. A plane, especially one with a 6-8" radius in the blade, can work well to make legs. Still when time was short Chris fell back on a drill press and jig to drill holes and a bandsaw to remove excess wood. With only four legs to make tapered tenons on we struggled through without a lathe.
My experience in all of these classes was when work needed to go faster the instructors feel back on: bandsaws to remove unwanted wood on tapered legs, arms..., electric drills to power a myriad of different drill bit types through tough wood, lathes to make precise tapered or straight round tenons, legs, rungs. I have a bandsaw and electric drills if I need them. Lately I have been considering buying a lathe. I know this is a hand tool forum and I am hoping to find out why I don't need one. I know about springpole and treadle lathes but are these really hand tools? I had the opportunity to use a lathe at my last class at Country Workshops. I was surprised to find that these tools typically produce shavings and wood chips too large to become airborne. Make no mistake, there are airborne pollutants produced by lathes but certainly not in the kind of quantity produced by other large woodworking machines
Lee Valley/Veritas offers tenon and dowel cutters I have not even tried yet, Veritas Tenon Cutters, Veritas Dowel and Tenon Cutters, Veritas Dowel Maker. Although some of these are made to work with electric drills I suspect they might work well in a brace too. Although the wood typically used to make these chair parts starts out green it is often placed in a kiln when it is not being worked on. Obviously the longer the wood is in the kiln the drier/harder it gets. White and red oak, elm, maple... can become much more difficult to work as a project progresses.
I am wondering if any fellow posters who may have done this work with hand tools would like to comment on their methods?