Joinery Archives - The Wireless Woodworker

Mission Table – Part 2 – Mortise and Tenons

December 1, 2020December 1, 2020
by Tim

Last time we covered the initial design and milling, so let’s get started cutting some joinery! The arts and crafts and mission style furniture is known for its mortise and tenon joints and there are almost 30 of them in just this small table. I’m certainly not going to show you all of them, considering they’re all cut pretty much the same way, but I will mention a few tricks.

The first trick to make things a little easier on yourself is mainly for hand tool users – it’s to size your tenons to your chisels. I used just two mortise chisels for this whole table, a ¼” and a ⅛”, and I set my marking gauge to the chisels size and used it for everything. This makes cutting the mortises a lot easier.

There are a thousand ways to cut a tenon and almost as many tutorials out there, so I won’t get into the specifics of how I saw them, but one of the things I like to do is use deep marking lines and make knife walls. This helps guide the saw and gives me a nice crisp line to pare down to with the chisel at the end.

For the small dovetail on the top rail I just cut the rough shape with a chisel, don’t worry about the saw – nobody is going to see this joint anyway.

I use the same marking gauge to mark my mortises, so I know they’ll be consistent. Again, I won’t go into specifics about the mortising process, there are plenty of tutorials out there that do a better job explaining it than I can, but one thing I like to do is to make a few shallow chisel grooves at first, just to create a little well to help guide you lining up the chisel when you start hammering.

I should also mention my setup – it’s never a good idea to hammer directly in the vise, so I clamp a piece of scrap wood in the vise, then clamp my piece to that, so that the workpiece is over a leg and held tight. I also use the scrap piece as a vertical guide for the chisel to make sure I’m straight up and down.

As I hammer across the length of the mortise I’ll leave about an ⅛” of an inch on both sides so that when I pry out the waste I don’t bruise the ends too much. This isn’t such a big deal on this piece because they’ll be hidden under the shoulders of the tenon, but it’s a good habit. I also have a sharpie mark on the chisel to know when I’m down to the correct depth.

During the test fit – one of the joints was a little bit too tight and a few swipes with a block plane fixed that. If it was a larger tenon I may use a shoulder plane to thin it down some.

And there we go for most of the joinery – I think 28 mortise and tenon joints total and then a single dovetail for the top rail on the front. This should hopefully keep the front from bowing out at all. The tenons on the aprons did overlap a little, so with a block plane I mitered those ends just a little bit.

Now I’m getting ready for pre-finishing with some smooth plane work – notice that I’ve taped over the glue surfaces so no finish gets in the way of the joints.

The next step is the panel joint for the top. If you plane both pieces at the same time it makes this joint super simple – this edge doesn’t even have to be square to the faces since any error will be off-set by the mirrored piece.

To check the fit, just “un-fold” the two pieces and see how they line up. I aim for a very slight spring to the joint that’ll close up with clamps.

I’m going to go ahead and glue up everything before I build the drawer, just because I want that fit to be right. But before I glue everything up, I’m going to pre-finish everything. This is a three step, super easy recipe from Bob Lang. The first coat is Varathane “Special Walnut” stain to darken everything.

The second step is a coat of Watco “Dark Walnut” danish oil to give it a little more tint.

The last step is a coat of amber shellac to warm everything up a bit.

Next time we’ll add some of the internal pieces and finally do the drawer. So that’s it for this time!

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The Shaker Side Table

August 9, 2017August 9, 2017
by Tim

One of the quintessential first woodworking projects seems to be a small side table. Some call these side tables, some call them end tables, plant stands, night tables… I have no idea what’s correct, but I’m sticking with side. Feel free to disagree. I’ve never made one so I think it’s about time.

I decided on a classic shaker design, mainly because it fits in with the style of our house, but also because the Schwarz did a great DVD for Lie-Nielsen a few years ago showing the build process step by step. His design has nice elegant lines and should last a lifetime – even with those tiny legs.

The basic side table form is such a great project for the novice woodworker because there are so many different options. As I was building it, all of the different joinery options became apparent. I went with mortise and tenons for the leg-to-apron joint, but you could easily do pegs, dominoes, or pocket holes. The same thing for the drawer construction – I went with dovetails all the way around, but you could do any number of different options. If you want to work on your turning you could make round legs, you could carve them if you want to get crazy, or add fancy moldings. The relatively small scale also makes it approachable from a hand tool perspective. This wood didn’t touch a machine until I turned the knob on the lathe.

Shaker designs generally look nice in most domestic hardwoods – Chris made his out of Maple… I’m going with Cherry – pine may also be a nice choice.

Selecting the right stock for the different pieces actually makes a big difference to the final look of the piece – I had no idea. For the legs you want nice straight grain lines on all four sides – Chris calls this bastard sawn, I call it rift sawn – I’m not sure if there’s a difference. The main thing is that you don’t want cathedrals on any of the leg’s sides interrupting the flow. On the other hand, these cathedrals add some nice interest to the aprons, so if you’re using plain sawn lumber like I am, save these center sections for the aprons and drawer front.

The 18” square top requires some more thought. I don’t have any 18″ wide cherry, but do have some 10” wide stock that I’ll use in a panel – you may have to use 3 pieces. To avoid a harsh line in the panel you want to aim for straight grain to straight grain along the edge. You could also do a bookmatch here if there was something interesting going on.

I didn’t film a lot of the finishing process – mainly because if I think if it’s boring to do it must be really dull to watch – but I did a few tests on some scrap cherry and decided on a thin coat of medium walnut danish oil with a shellac polish – my preferred top coat. I finish everything off with some paste wax.

I’m really happy with how everything came out. The cherry is maybe a little splotchy, but nobody except me will ever notice. It fits in with the house really well and is something I’m happy to take credit for when people comment.

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The Workbench – Joinery

February 15, 2016
by Tim

Now that all the rough milling, sizing, and laminating is completed we can finally get started on some of the joinery and assembly for the workbench. All the main joints are drawbored mortise and tenon construction, so let’s get started sawing and chopping!

If you remember from last time, I made all the legs and stretchers the same size. To make life easy on myself, I’m going to do the same thing for all the mortise and tenon joints. With my legs and stretchers all cut to size, I marked out the 12 tenons needed ( 1 x each of the 4 legs, 2 x each of the 4 stretchers). I used my 1″ chisel to set my mortise marking gauge, then roughly found the center of one of the legs, and marked my gauge lines referencing the marked reference face. The tenon cheeks are pretty much the same size, but it shouldn’t matter as long as I always reference the same face.

Now I get started sawing, cutting the two vertical lines first, then working in from each side. I did all of these cuts with the Lie-Nielsen rip tenon saw.

When the lines were all cut, I check for squareness, then trim up the tenon as needed with either a shoulder plane, rabbeting block plane, or chisel.

After all the tenons were cut, I had a nice set of 24 blocks for my daughter. She loves them!

Now it’s on to the mortises, which took quite a bit more effort than the tenons. I used the same mortise gauge to mark all the mortises towards the bottom of each leg (again, referencing the correct face). The bulk of the waste was removed with the brace and 1″ bit, then everything was cleaned up with that same 1″ chisel.

As you can see from the below picture, my mortises meet in the middle. No problem really, just means I’m going to have to miter the ends of my tenons a bit.

With the base sub-assembly complete and test fit, I clamped it all together, the flipped it over to mark the mortises on the underside of the top. It’s not a perfect size, it’s actually a little bit narrower than the top, but the important thing here is to get the front legs in line with the front of the top. I don’t really care if the back legs are flush with the back of the top.

Same procedure as before – bore out most of the waste…

then clean up with a chisel.

Now for a test fit!

It looks great, so I’m going to go ahead and drawbore the leg sub-assembly together. The pegs are about 1/2″ in diameter, with a healthy 1/8″ of drawbore action. This seemed to cinch everything up nice and tight. I’m using glue for these joints, but won’t for the top joints. If I ever want to take it apart I should just be able to drill out the top pegs to remove the legs.

Before I flipped everything over for the final time, I added a little support for the shoulder vise. I’m not sure if this is really necessary, but makes me feel better if I ever want to put something heavy on that section.

There we have it – flipped over and almost ready to go!

It was a bear to flip over, so I’m hoping I only have to do that once. The top of the top is obviously a bit messy with glue squeeze out, but a quick flattening did the trick there.

At this point I have a perfectly use-able workbench and I’ve got to say it’s a great size. It fits exactly where I was planning, and isn’t too large that I can’t move it around when I need too, or too small that it moves around when doing heavy planing. Now all that’s left is to finish up the vises, add some dog holes, and do some final finishing touches. Until then, I’m enjoying the bench so far!