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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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Mission Table – Part 1

  • October 16, 2018December 1, 2020
  • by Tim

Today we are going to be starting a mission style end table build.  I’m going to try doing things a little differently this time by doing a multi-part video, rather than cramming everything into one, so hopefully you like the format.  If so, or not, let me know down in the comments. I hope that this gives a little better insight into the whole design and build process.

The first step is the initial planning and design.

I actually have fairly specific parameters and dimensions for this build because I’m making it mainly to hold a dollhouse for my daughter.  My grandfather actually made this dollhouse a number of years ago before he passed away with the intention of giving it to my children, so I think it deserves something special to sit on.

I don’t have a whole lot of criteria for the overall style, the room that it’s going in is fairly non-descript, so I thought this would be a good chance to do a mission style – arts and crafts piece.  My goal is to do a Morris chair eventually, so this should be a good introduction.

I use Blender just because it’s what I’m familiar with, but you could use Sketchup or any other modeling program.  Obviously this step isn’t necessary if you’re already working off a plan, but I’m putting my own design together, so wanted to try to get the dimensions correct before cutting the wood.

I started with the top because I knew the dimensions I needed to match the dollhouse.  I also knew how high I wanted it, so adding the legs was easy, but getting the proportions looking right was tricky.  I played around with different leg thicknesses until I got something that I think should look nice, then started adding some other elements.

I knew that I wanted to add a drawer, but with the short table I didn’t want it too tall, so I played around a little bit with the apron height.  Then finally, because this is a mission style piece, I added in the slats on the sides and played around with the number and width of them.

Once I was happy with the overall proportions, I cleaned up the mesh a little bit off camera and did a few renders to show off the final design.  Overall I think it looks nice and should fit the need well – it’s always interesting to see how 3D models look in real life, so I’m excited to get started building.

With all the pieces cut to rough size, I work on planing everything down to their final dimensions.  This step is quite tedious, so I typically don’t do this all at once, but rather as I need the pieces.  This part is in real time so you can see how long it takes to get a couple of flat faces and a square edge.  For this small piece, which is one of the front rails, it takes about 4 or 5 minutes to get close enough.

I normally start with a couple swipes of the jack plane with a cambered iron to get rid of the saw marks, then switch to the jointer plane to get a nice flat face.  If you listen to the sound that the plane makes and also look at the shaving to make sure I have a full length, full width shaving, then I know I have a flat face.

Once that’s established I mark the thickness with a marking gauge and flip it over to plane it down to final thickness.  I actually don’t need a 4-squared board for this piece, so don’t really bother checking the squareness at this point – it’s fairly close, which is all I really care about.

As I plane down to the right thickness you can see that I’m constantly checking the marks both by eye and by feel.  Sometimes the marks can be hard to see, but as you get close to the marks you can typically feel the gauge line. You know you’re pretty much done when you get little strings on the corners of the face.

After a quick square check, I mark the flat faces and move on to the next one.

That’s it for the first part and if you found this section a little slow, hopefully the joinery and assembly in the next part will be a little more exciting.