Fixing a BIG mortise and tenon mistake.

so I was gonna start my morning today by making a video about how I make really perfect nice Tenon's on the table saw without a Jake it was gonna be great I was really looking forward to it but instead I got down in the shop and first thing I realized I've made a major mistake on piece of client work so I guess my video is gonna be about that instead let me explain what's going on this piece of furniture behind me here is a humidor it's for keeping cigars in and yeah I didn't know they came this big either but cool it's still a really interesting piece of work now it's roughly the size of like a pantry or an armoire and it's really just a cabinet there's nothing super complicated about it the way it came it had sliding glass doors there's aluminum tracks up here and there are pieces of glass that slid back and forth the owner would like to take this and change the doors into the regular kind that open and close like you'd have on a fine furniture cabinet so I'm basically just making hardwood doors installing glass matching the finish and putting them on no big deal except I have run into a bit of a snag we originally came up with the design which looks like this and I did the sketch up drawing and then I kind of put the whole thing out of my mind and originally the doors were supposed to run from the top of the cabinet all the way to the bottom four doors and they meet kind of seamlessly down in the middle then after I did it the client called me up one day and this happens all the time and the client said hey could we add some crown molding to the top and sort of quarter round detail molding to the bottom and I said oh sure no big deal and he even found a place that had crown molding in the appropriate wood and bought it and brought it over so I was like great client this is going wonderfully I got nothing to worry about so I just started making my components to make these doors and got on with the project well I forgot that if there's going to be a crown molding here and there's gonna be a roundover detail trim on the bottom the doors can't go from the top to the bottom anymore there has to be Ace actually has to be a lot of space and this wouldn't be a problem except I've already cut all the components for my doors here let me show you so here are the rails and the styles for my doors now the rails are fine I don't have to worry about those but now the styles are two and a quarter inches too long and that wouldn't matter I would just trim them shorter except I've already cut the mortises and it's even more complicated than that when I first figured out that I'd made this mistake what I was really hoping is that I could just cut off all the boards right here and then redo the mortises no big deal unfortunately it's not that simple I've set my square for two and a quarter inches that's the distance that I have to cut off and you can see it's gonna put me right in the middle of the mortises that I already cut now in a perfect world I would just take all of these parts and refabricate them but that's not really reasonable for this job the lumberyard that I got these from is an hour away these boards were a little on the expensive side and I've really already spent the materials budget for this project so what I have to do is get rid of this extra length while still making an aesthetically pleasing and functional mortise at the bottom and that's not exactly easy but they say it the mark of a good craftsman is his or her ability to hide their mistakes that's what distinguishes a professional from an amateur so am i a professional am i bad good we're about to find out [Applause] the first thing I'm gonna do is lay out my door styles not sure I've got faces I like facing up that the mortises are facing in and then marking the ends that I'm gonna cut off once I get into batch cutting them at the table saw it's gonna be way too easy to cut off something I don't want to get rid of this also gives me an opportunity to get rid of some minor blemishes so I'm gonna try and look for the silver lining in this now I'm gonna cut the excess length off of all of my boards I've got my board set up with the side that I marked over here against the fence now usually it's not cool to use the fence while you're doing a crosscut because something will get trapped and kickback against you but you see here I've put in a little tiny fence extension that I just super glued on temporarily what that's gonna let me do is register the piece against the fence so I know I'm cutting off the right length and then as I move it forward it's no longer against that little extension piece and it's free to move and it's not gonna get bound up against the fence so now I can zip this little part off double check it and do all the rest of them and I'll know that I have the exact same amount of length taken off of each one and I'll do it safely all of my pieces are trimmed to the correct length now but now the mortise isn't what I want it to be at all it's open on the end and that would probably hold together fine but I don't like the way it's gonna look and I'm not sure it's gonna be as strong as I really want this is a nice piece of furniture that I'm working on and I'm charging a pretty good price for it so I'm not going to give the customer some sort of half-ass fix what I'm gonna do instead of leaving this open this way is I'm gonna make a small filler piece that's gonna slide in there very precisely I'm gonna glue it in let it dry and then recut the mortise as if this weren't here at all so now I've got eight filler pieces that are almost exactly perfect to fit inside a little bit of mortise that's left I left them a little bit fat on purpose because I'm going for a really good fit and what I did over here was I just took my regular rolled four and a half hand plain doesn't have to be a four and a half you can use anything you want I set it for a light cut and I put it in my vise and now to trim these down to the right side I just take the piece of wood and just push it over the cutter and that takes a really light cut now we're almost there let me do one more okay so that ended up being several passes on the plane but now I have a really nice plug that's gonna fit perfectly so I just need a little bit of glue on either side now you're gonna worry about the bottom because it's end grain so I don't care fit that in there tap it into flush with the outside set it on the floor make sure it bottoms out and now you can see I've got a good plug it fills up that mortise hole pretty much completely and it's gonna be really easy to trim it flush once the glue dries once the glue is dry I'll cut the end of the plug with a dovetail saw and flush up the edge with a hand plane now the repair isn't invisible but it's strong and clean and well integrated into the original piece it's definitely good enough for what I'm gonna do next now that my plugs are trimmed and flush cut I'm pretty much back to square one with this piece it's a nice solid piece again and it's ready to be remotest and put together with the doors and the temptation here is just to push through and keep going and fix that mistake and get back on track and all of that good stuff but right now this is actually a great time to double check and make sure the thing I did to fix the problem actually fixed the problem because sometimes you go through all the steps you planned out to fix something you don't realize that you actually made it worse or didn't take it far enough or it messed something else up so it's a good time to double check and here's how I'm gonna do that I've taken a little piece with a crown molding and cut it off of the bigger piece so this will be my spacer and you put this up against where it's gonna be just rough placement is good enough and then I'm gonna put my newly trimmed and fixed door style right up next to it and then I'm gonna check and make sure that it lines up in the bottom where I want it to and as you can see it hits right in the middle of this divider that's in the middle of the cabinet that's exactly where I want it to be the size here is perfect and I'm ready to move on as long as I'm doing this let me just talk a little bit about how I do my mortises I start by running gauged lines with mortise engage this might seem like a dumb step since I do machine mortising but I've noticed that jigs and fixtures can drift out of alignment slowly and if you don't have some sort of guideline you'll never notice it happening taking a couple extra minutes to run these lines and darken them in with a pencil lets me know that everything is staying the same cut after cut once I've got my mortise gauged I've got two squares set to different depths and I use those to strike two lines that tell me where my mortise starts and ends since this mortise is so close to the edge of the board I can't really use stop blocks so I've got to go by I and having lines is the only way that I can do that for doing mortises I use a plunge router and the Jay Bates mortising guide I'll link to his video down in the description and I think it's just the best and easiest way to make a mortising guide that really works and is very consistent basically if you have a plunge router you can make really good mortises and all you need is scraps and a little bit of land and hardware since this is a haunched mortise and tenon I'm gonna make my first pass with the router all the way through the end of the board and that'll give me the space to fit the honcho of the tenon into the mortise then I'll increase the depth of my cut and make another cut only until my gauge line then I'll repeat that shorter cut over and over again until I reach the bottom of my 1-inch Morris this is a good example of a machine made mortise it's tight and precise but the corners are rounded because I'm using a round cutter to make it and the tenon that I'm gonna use with this has square shoulders and square ends so those rounded corners are going to be a problem what I'm gonna do is just take a 3/8 chisel and square those up real quick now I've got a nice mortise with square corners and I can test fit it with my tenon and make sure it's gonna fit now my piece is trimmed to the correct length remotest and squared up everything's ready to go so now I'm pretty much back where I thought I was when I came down in the shop yesterday morning this fix took me about half a day maybe a little bit more if you factor in glue time so there's a couple ways I could look at this I could be really upset that I lost half a day on this project that's definitely money out of my pocket in the form of productivity but there's another way to look at it which is there was nothing stopping me from missing this mistake and assembling the doors and only discovering it once they were glued up and the glue is dropped if that had happened I would have been what's the word Oh screwed I would have been completely screwed if I had assembled the doors and then figured out they were too big so this not a catastrophe and I'm not that upset about it also the client is ok with it I called him up and explained what was going on and he thought my fix was just fine obviously when you're dealing with clients it's tough to know what to tell them every project has some mistakes and you're not gonna call them every time you make a little error but you also want to be as ethical as you can possibly be and this was big enough that I really felt like the client had to know this client was also particularly cool about it I don't think he even really cared once I explained what was going on he was like whatever you know what you're doing just fix it great some other clients have more complicated personalities and they require a little bit more management from the craftsman it's all just part of being in business before I go I'd like to thank my newest patron Daniel Johnson and thank all of my patrons especially my newest very close to reaching my first goal of $100 a month and when I hit that goal I'm gonna buy some better more professional lighting I'm still not happy with the way in my videos look they're a little dark and a little bit yellowish sometimes and some professional lighting would really help with that so if you'd like to help me meet that first goal go to patreon.com/scishow and throw a couple dollars in the Hat I've got a lot of rewards and exclusive content for my patrons and it's a really simple ratio when I get more patrons I make more better content and you can help with that so thanks a lot in advance and thanks for watching

Channel: Rex Krueger

Views: 45,509

Keywords: mortise, tenon, mortise and tenon, joint, joinery, ash, frame, cabinet, door, router, chisel, mistake, troubleshoot, fix, make, maker, wood, shop

Id: PPSvgGM-oa8

Length: 13min 23sec (803 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 28 2018