Drill Press Mortising

hi I'm Tim Johnson senior editor at American woodworker magazine and today I'd like to show you mortices but instead of using a mortising machine i'm going to show you how to cut them using a drill press with a mortising attachment now I know what you're thinking those drill press mortising attachments don't work they're a big waste of money but I'm here to tell you they do work and they cost a heck of a lot less than a mortising machine now the mortising attachment accessory kits come two ways either they're dedicated for the machine that you have or they're Universal Universal kits are made to fit drill presses of several different sizes now they also come with a lot of parts that we won't be using but there are a few parts that you have to have they include the chisel holder and the chisel holder on a universal set usually comes with bushings that allow you to adapt it to fit your drill press and the critical dimension is the diameter of the stop collar on the quill of your drill press you also get a fence and with the fence comes a hold down that mounts on the fence the other thing that you need of course is a mortising chisel set sometimes the chisels are included in the drill press accessory kit and sometimes you have to buy them separately these are the only parts that we're going to need and now I'm going to show you how to install them on the drill press the first thing I want to show you is the fence you'll notice that I've attached it to its own table it's very simple to do you just have to drill a couple holes install some bolts and wing nuts and tighten it down the reason that I do this is because it makes the fence much easier to adjust now we're going to install the chisel holder the first step is to install the two bushings which are these split rings and I'm putting them together I'm keeping the splits aligned and then I slide them up and onto the stop collar and snug them all the way to the top I noticed I've kept those splits aligned after that I'm going to slide the chisel holder itself keeping the split in the front of it aligned and now I just typed it down and it's important to tighten this snug because you don't want this thing to slip when you start cutting the mortises now it's time to install the mortising bit which you can see is a two-part device that consists of a hollow square chisel and an auger that fits inside now when you install these two parts it's important that you leave a slight gap between the auger and the chisel you don't want them snug against one another or it won't work and the way to do that is to set both pieces together underneath the holder and then push the chisel all the way up until it fits against the shoulder of the holder but instead of tightening it there drop it down about a sixteenth of an inch and lock it in place next take the auger and slide it up into the collet now if your auger happens to be too long it's not a big deal all you have to do is get out your hacksaw and shorten it as I said take the bit up until it fits tight and then tighten it tighten the Chuck and finally loosen the chisel slide it up against the shoulder and tighten it now we've got the correct clearance between the auger and the chisel the next thing I want to do is to add a little bit of dry lube between the auger and the chisels and I'm going to test to make sure that the auger is properly centered centered if it was not centered we hear horrible tweet this looks good one of the things that's important is to set the speed of the drill press correctly these bits work the best with speeds between a thousand and 1500 rpm so I've set the speed of this drill press at 1500 rpm the next step is to adjust the fence relative to the chisel and to do that I need the workpiece now I'm going to cut a mortise in the middle of this surface and so right now I'm just going to eyeball it I'm going to move the chisel down close to the surface lock it in place eyeball the center and install the first clamp now this will allow me to pivot the other end to make a precise adjustment now you can see that I've drawn the centerline of the mortise as well as the two end points and my job now is to align the center point of the auger bit with the centre line that I've drawn on the workpiece right there now we're good to go all I need to do is install the other clamp the next step is to set the depth of cut you'll notice on the end of the workpiece I've drawn a line that indicates the bottom of the mortise so all I need to do is lower the chisel down to that line and what I want to line up is the arch the top of the arch on the side of the chisel with the line that will assure that they make a deep enough cut and the depth is set now we're going to install the hold down this is the hold down and it mounts on a rod and it's important that the rod have a flat back so you can really tighten the hold down down and also tighten the rod at its mounting point in the fence a flat spot gives you much greater purchase than a round rod and when I position the hold down on the workpiece it's important that the hold down is flush with the workpiece if it mounts crooked so that the bottom edge of the hold down is not in content with the workpiece get out your file and file it until it does and make sure that the bit isn't going to run into the hole down once you've got it tightened and position the accessory sets come with these u-shaped rods which are meant to Snug the workpiece against the fence to keep her from moving back and forth just like we've used the hold down to hold it firmly against the work table but rather than use these guys I prefer just to use a board with a jointed square edge and I just clamp this guy in position at both ends so I snug it against the workpiece and the workpiece against the fence and the advantage of this now once I've got it in position is that after when I'm cutting my mortises all I need to do to reposition the piece is loosen the hold down and I'll be able to slide the piece back and forth tighten the hold down and I'm good to go and I know that it's held in exactly the right position mortising puts an awful lot of pressure on the table of the drill press so to keep it from flexing we're going to add a support underneath it now this support is just made out of two sticks of wood with a piece of sandpaper glued to one of them and a couple of clamps this makes it adjustable i've already adjusted it for height so all i have to do is wedge it in place there now we're ready to start cutting the mortise finally alright now we're going to move the workpiece into position to cut the first mortise the first thing I have to do is loosen the hold down and now I can slide the whole workpiece back into position remember this line that I drew that's the top of the mortise and what I want to do is align the outside edge of the chisel with that line there we go I'm going to lock the hold down in position and we're ready to cut that's the first mortise now what we're going to do is move to the opposite end align the chisel with the line that marks the bottom of the mortise Rock the hole down in place and now we're going to establish the mortis at the other end next we're going to move to the center the idea here is that when you use these chisels you always keep all four sides engaged or the front and back engaged you don't want to have three sides engaged or else now I'm going to clean up the areas in between the full mortises that I've cut the only important thing is that the center spur of the auger engaged the wood that you're going to remove one more cut now you can after we've cut those four there's no crime in just sliding a little bit to clean up the shoulders I'm going to remove the hold down there's our mortise hi I'm Tim Johnson senior editor at American woodworker magazine and today I'd like to show you how to chop traditional square shouldered motors mortise it's murders today I'd like to show you how to cut traditional square shouldered mortises but instead of using a drill press robot everything we've done so far has been done to hold this workpiece absolutely dead dead

Channel: AmericanWoodworker

Views: 566,046

Rating: 4.7575278 out of 5

Keywords: drill press, drill, drills, moritising, drill press mortising, mortising attachment, American Woodworker, woodworking, woodworker, workshop, video, videos, woodworking shops, wood

Id: hxyWfze3qzQ

Length: 12min 2sec (722 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 11 2013