How to cut a THROUGH MORTICE AND TENON by HAND

hello everyone in this video I'm going to show you how to cut a through mortise and tenon joints it's quite tricky it takes quite a while but this is how you do it let's go right so we've got our two blank bits of timber so let's get in close and I'll show you what tools we need right so to cut out this joint firstly we need to mark it out so for that we're gonna need a marking knife we're going to need a square we're going to need a marking gauge and we're going to need a mortise gage and a ruler as well so we cut the tenon side of it we're obviously going to need a big old tenon source of grab yourselves one of them and to finesse the tenon afterwards a couple of chisels is really handy as well and then to actually cut out the mortise you're going to need to get a mallet and of course a mortise chisel and finally you're going to need some sort of novelty pen to mark out the joints of course and a pencil is quite handy to have as well and also another little addition you can have is a shoulder plane because it helps finesse the tenon a little bit more but it's not essential so let's get marking this out right firstly let's clear the bench okay so the first thing to do here is just to establish which one's going to be our mortise and which one's going to be our tenon and a lot of people actually get confused about which way round the mortise and tenon is the way that the way that I used to remember it is that the tea for tenon kind of looks like a tenon in a way and the other way I used to remember it is mortise kind of house sort of like a deep sound to it like mortise and like you imagine saying that in a cave it would be quite echoey and it caves like and what it's how I used to remember it so mortise is the one with the hole in it tenon is the one that sticks out so with this through tenon I have an option if I want to make it flush on the edge or if I want it to protrude a little bit now in the series that I did on how to make a practice joint frame I did it flush with the edge of the timber so on this one I might as well have it sticking out so firstly let's mark this one's going to be the tenon oricon and this one can be the mortise so write that on there and then I'm also going to do a face side and faced edge on both these components so this is what we're going to reference our square off either face edge from both edges or the face side using both edges like that as well so you can get access to all four sides using just those two faces and that's going to ensure accurate marking out so I'm gonna have the tenon protruding out the mortise about five millimeters or so so I'll get a square on the face side and then slide that tenon component up and down that so I can choose how far I want it to stick out now I can also get a ruler on here to do this so I'll measure about five millimeters which is around there so then I can put a little knife mark on the tenon component right where that mortise component ends so just a tiny mark on the corner there now just make that a little bit deeper so I can easily see it there we go that's where our shoulder line is going to be so I've got a tiny mark there and if I line that up with this edge of the mortise you can see it sitting proud by about five millimeters so we're going to square that line all the way around using a square and to the knife making sure that our square is always referencing off one of these two sites so where's that little mark there it is and we've got our face edge here so square referencing off that going to put my knife into the mark slide the square up to it and then do a light score to start with and then gradually increase the pressure and then we've got around this edge so square on the face side get your knife into that corner mark and then you can slide the square up to it and drive back a few more times right there we go so that is squared around all four sides now and now I can get our mortise gage now when you're choosing the width of your tenon here you need to do it at the same size as your mortise chisel the reason being obviously the mortise when we chop it out is going to be the same width as this so if your tenon is too wide or too small it's gonna be a little bit of a nightmare to fit so match the size of your mortise chisel in this case this is eight millimeters so the tenon is going to be eight millimeters wide so with this marking gauge from Veritas what you can normally get is a sort of shaft clamp here so you can offset these heads eight millimeters apart from each other and then move both rods in unison to one another I don't have that clamp so the way I tend to do this is get a ruler and put it on the shoulder line here and then just simply Mark eight millimeters apart so this component is 30 millimeters wide so I'm going to mark 15 millimeters which is the halfway point and then because I want it to be eight millimeters wide I'm going to mark four millimeters the site of that center point okay so now if I put my mortise chisel up to that that is exactly the same width as those two points so now I'll get both of these lined up with those two points on there and this is referencing the stock of the marking gauge from the face side all right and there we go so instead of scratching them both exactly the same time just do one at the time and do light scratches as you go so I'm doing the fast sight to start with light pressure and then increase it and then the close one and we're gonna do this round all three sides okay so that's all done now and I'll wait it's getting close here and see which way the bevels on this marking gauge are going so as you can see the bevels on the end of this mortise gauge are beveled into the tenon component that we're going to keep this isn't much of an issue for the tenon component but when it comes to marking out the mortise later on this is going to be very important but the reason I'm showing you this now is because when you set up this mortise gauge you want to leave it in that exact position so if you set it up the wrong way around now while you're marking out the tenon and then it comes to coming up the mortise later on you're going to realize that it's the wrong way around and you're gonna have to swap it round and thus ruin some of your measurements flat so the mortise gage going out towards the wayside and the bevels on them going into the keep side if you have one of those old-style marking gauges with the pin heads on them don't worry too much about this but after you finish watching this video it might convince you to upgrade to something like this as opposed to the old pin style ones all right so now we've established the thickness of the tenon Rand all three sides we need to decide on the width of it here so I'm probably gonna just inset this about five millimeters again and I'm going to use a marking gauge for this so simply measure five millimeters from the stock lock it all in place and then I'm going to score rounds to the edge of this component now when you do this remember that's our face edge so don't go scoring around this edge and then go from this edge because if this component isn't perfectly parallel it's gonna make your tenon slightly tapered or too wide so always reference it from this edge if you have a lot of these tendons to do might be worth getting to marking gauges so you can have one for this closed edge and one set for the far edge but for this case I've only got one cut so I'm just going to reset this one so pressing against the face edge going to light pressure and increase it and do this last side okay and then for the far side just gonna measure in five millimeters give myself a little mark and then I can set the marking gauge that as well okay so that's all marked out so let's just mark our waist around the edge of this so we don't cut out the wrong bit right there we go so there's the tenon all marked out so let's move on to the mortise so at this I want the tenon to be pretty central in that component so I'm going to get that centralised on there so the tenon is lined up with the mortise and I've got the two lines that we've just scratched on with our marking gauge so what I'm going to do with that is get them lined up like this and then using those two lines I'm gonna hold both the components together to make sure they don't slip and I'm going to put a little knife mark at each of those marking gauge lines on the mortise components so transfer them across to the other component being careful not to drop off my thumb okay so we've got two knife marks which has now been transferred from the tenon onto the mortise component okay and then I can use those lines on the mortise component and I want to extend those down this side and down this side so to do that we're also going to use the face edges and the face side so put a knife into one of those lines slide the square up to it and do some light pressure so it doesn't need to be too heavy along the top here cuz we're going to be playing that off afterwards and now down at one of the edges so referencing off the face side knife goes into one of those cuts on the corner slide the square up and drag it back these ones on the outside can be a little bit heavier but not too heavy because we might want to remove them later on and then on the inside of this component because the face edge is going to be on the outside so on this inside face I'm gonna do this quite heavy because this is all gonna be hidden by the tenon shoulders and it's gonna get slammed by the mortise chisel later on anyway so we're going to need these marks to be pretty prominent okay there we go so marks around three sides we don't need to do this other one because that would be utterly pointless so this with the same settings we're going to reference off the face side and scratch between those two knife lines that we've just put on there so this is where the bevel orientation of the mortise gauge is very important so I'll scratch this on first and then I'll explain that you so like pressure just scratch in between the two lines here and obviously doing one of the heads at a time don't try and do them both okay flip it round do the same so again on this inside face make him nice and heavy right with those birthmark towel I'll explain this better orientation real quick okay so I've marks for waste out with this middle bit here of the mortise so that's obviously going to be removed you can see the bevels on the heads of this mortise gauge are faced into that waste material and the reason we want this is because that bevel is going to leave a small shadow line on this side of the component whereas if these bevels were the wrong way around you can have a little shadow gap that surrounds the tenon on both of these walls it's not a massive issue because you can plane it off later but if you really start digging this mortise cage in then you know it's gonna take a lot to plain out later on if you do like schools then it'll be easier to remove but then it's going to be harder to follow those lines so this tends to be how I do it because then it ensures that I get a nice square wall on this outside bit and the bevel is faced into the waist area which we're going to remove later on okay so with both of those marks out we are ready to start cutting them out now the order in which you do this is very important you pretty much always want to do the mortise first as opposed to doing the tenon first and the reason for this will be very apparent once I chop out this mortise so let's do that now right so when chopping out the more if there's a few things that you can do to make it a little bit easier for yourself firstly see if you can cramp the mortise above a leg on your workbench that way when you're whacking into this with a chisel you're gonna get much better than power transfer I've had to put a little spacer here in order to clamp that piece there whereas before when I had it just between the dogs it was floating out above this section here which just wouldn't have been useful whatsoever I would have lost so much power and also if I went too far with the mortise chisel there would be nothing supporting it underneath which means I could probably blow through the other side with this chisel which would be absolutely catastrophic the other thing I'm doing here is standing with my sight going down the component like this so when I put the chisel in I can see if it's rocking side to side obviously with this I need to make sure it's going in perfectly square if you stand round here you can see this angle but you can't see that angle and the angle that's more important here is this one here so this is where we want to stand so let's get in close and I'll show you how to chop this out right so with this we're gonna get the chisel right in the middle like that between those marking gauge lines and then get it upright and give it some firm whacks okay that's got down pretty deep and now we can take a step back from that and take off I don't know about five six millimeters then keep working back okay and that's gonna be our final chop going this way we're going to leave quite a lot of material here the reason for this is to remove that excess material we're going to be want to be leaving against that material on the edge there and if else to chop right up against that line it means that as I leave up it's going to damage below that and it might even go as far as exposing beyond the tenon so if you leave a bit sacrificial material there in the waste first that can be damaged instead of beyond that nice line there so now let's go the other way okay the same again on the other side we'll leave a bit of material there and then that can be our sacrificial material you see it just gets absolutely mushed the further down ya in fact that's actually already gone beyond the line so that is why I put the shoulder on the edge of the tenon there because that's going to hide it right so that's all that waste remove so let's go again okay so we're pretty much approaching the other side now but I don't want to smash through right to the other side firstly because I don't want to damage my workbench obviously but secondly because it's gonna be proper messy if I do that so let's get all this material out first okay so as we're approaching the bottom of the mortise what I'm gonna do is put the chisel up against the side I'm gonna stop it about five millimeters from the bottom there so that is how far down I want to cut before working from the other side so far we've been working on the inside of the joint so like I said all of this is going to be hidden by the tenon so get that about five minutes from the bottom and then I'm going to put a little bit of masking tape around it and that is going to be our depth stop very high-tech as you can see yeah that's close I need to get so now every time I work this in I can see how far down blimey I'm getting quite close there just as well as stopped so I've only got a dear a few small taps here all right there we go a think that is all the waste out so now let me explain to you why we cut the mortise first right so you can see the tenon component laying on top of the mortise and you can see that the mortise component is now ever so slightly wider despite using the same water's gauge to scratch the lines on both components and that's because of the slight tip is that you get from the chisel basically it starts bruising the walls off that mortise so if I was to cut this tenon first go right down to those lines and get it absolutely perfect and then chop out the mortise by hand by the time those walls have all been bruised up you can see that it's going to be slightly too big to fit the tenon and it's obviously going to be wobbly in there so if you've done mortise and Tenon's in the past and they always turn out wobbly that is probably the reason why cut your mortise first and then make the tenon fit into that don't do it the other way around because the mortise walls are gonna get damaged and it's going to end up bigger than expected so up until this point we've been working on the inside of the components so this is where the tenon is going to be nested all of this is hidden later on and I said the mortise is going to end up wider than expected so if I was to smash all the way through this obviously that is going to hit my workbench and damage it quite considerably it might blow out the timber on the opposite side but also imagine how off that chisel is going to be at the bottom of this cavity considering the top of it is already too wide as it is so what I'm going to do to counteract that is flip this component over and we're going to start working from the other side but to prevent any more bruising from the mortise chisel I'm actually going to use the smaller chisel that is narrower than the width of this chisel so this one is 8 millimetres I've got a little bevel edge chisel here that is six millimeter so that's going to sit between the lines and leave about a millimeter either side and because we've worked pretty much all the way through leaving about five millimeters and material a little bevel edge chisel such as this one will easily penetrate through that so I'm going to put it right in the center as I did with the mortise chisel there we go we're through so now exactly the same movement as the mortise chisel few small steps back careful not to hit either of those outer lines I'm just going to keep working back into them about a millimeter from all four lines now don't leave that material out using this side because it's gonna damage that wall that is our show face Steph maybe just sort of stab down into it and just press it through to the other side right now working back through from the tenon side so the inside face that's going to be hidden and we're gonna clean up these lines so instead of whacking straight into it I'm gonna remove half of it first make sure to get between those lines not so you're only gonna go as far as the masking tape here is our depth stop right and then chisel can go into that line okay once I've done so now this other face thought this one is absolutely mullet and then coming in from the show face again so we're gonna get the chisel that's too small and we're just gonna work our way back to those lines very carefully okay so that's the edges done and now we can do these long edges all right so now we've got it in a vise and we're gonna work these outer walls get a wide chisel light as wide as you can find an officee make sure it actually fits in the mortise first about a millimeter away the material here so I'm going to take half of that to start with just be careful doing this because you don't want it splitting along the grain and going beyond that marking gauge line okay and then we'll carefully remove that so now these walls are spot on where they need to be so we need to make sure we don't damage them or whatsoever right a little bit of cleanup on those inside faces just make sure there's no fluffy bits or anything like that it's now we're gonna just start checking these inside walls so you can put a ruler for it and you're basically looking for it to touch both this bottom corner and to the corner on the opposite side as well so that's good there but then on this side you see I've got a little bit of a rock going on so I can see there's material in there and on this side as well I've got something going on in there so so I'm gonna get a chisel in there and just carefully remove that I'll see we don't want to damage these outs of also be very careful with them see the cleaner in here you get this the more time you take on it the easier it's gonna be to fit the tenon later on so do take your time with it okay so the mortise still chopped out and that's cleaned up to the best of my abilities being careful not to damage the outside edge now we can start chopping the tenon out so as you can see I've clamped it in here at 45 degrees and that way when I saw down these lines I only have to focus on following two of them as opposed to all three of them if I was clamping it upright and sawing down the end grain like this so clamp it like that and then you've only got to focus on two at a time so I'm going to cut about a millimeter away from the lines here okay so that's that side done and now let's flip it over and do the other side okay and now we've also got some sort of like pyramid shape going on between there so we can get it upright and just saw down to the shoulder line right then before cutting these cheeks off obviously we've got our marking gauge line going along the top here so if we cut those off then we're not gonna be able to follow that line so we're going to cut that first right then we'll cut these cheeks off first right so because of the way we've cut this mortise obviously it's quite bruised on the inside there but on the outside here that is spot on our marking gauge lines so when cutting the cheeks of these I've only cut the two large sides off I've left these little ones on the edge here and that way we still have our marking gauge line that we scratched on earlier for these faces here and the reason I've left those bits of material on is because we can work back to the lines later on now like I said up here we're probably gonna have to go a little bit larger than the marking gauge lines because that is where the mortise is a lot wider whereas on this end of the tenon that is spot on the marking gauge lines there on the mortise so because this is poking out about five millimeters beyond the mortise I'm going to trim this tenon back to be spot on the marking gauge lines for the first 10 millimeters or so for the tenon so we can account for the five millimeters that pokes out plus about five millimeters inside as well so we've got about a millimeter of material between this face here and the marking gauge line on top so I'm going to take that down to half a millimeter to start with and I'm going to do some very very small taps because we're chiseling down ingrain here you really don't want to give massive whacks it because it's chances are it's gonna split the wrong way so little control taps okay so we're about half a millimeter from that line all the way around there and we're going to do exactly the same on the sides now that first 10 millimeters or so nothing more okay now I'm gonna put my chisel into that line I'm going to tap it through until we start hitting the material that we want to keep this so we've passed through the saw cut and we've hit the material on the other side so I'll do the same on the other side now essentially what I'm aiming to do here is to transfer the marking gauge lines that were on this face on to the material that we're going to keep so when we chop these cheeks off we still have a little reference line on there we can work to and now because I've taken some small notches out either side I can finish off the end grain so I took it to about half a millimeter first now I can take it straight down to that line I'll do the same on the other side right now because we carefully work back to the marking gauge line so you can see as I put that in there it's a pretty snug fit that's all gonna hold itself in place so now what I'm going to do is chop these little bits off and we can trim the tenon to its final width and again we'll carefully trim back to these lines for the first ten millimeters I'll say right there we go because we've marked back to the marking gauge lines carefully that is a nice snug fit in there there's no side side movement but if you put it in the other side it wobbles all over the place so that demonstrates how much those mortise walls are bruised compared to this nice crisp side we've got on the outside so now when we've pretty much gotta do is just tidy up the rest of this tenon to make it fit in this knobby bit of the mortise back here okay and then to get this fitted I'm just gonna get my face edges both facing upwards obviously and then just try and test fit it so it's binding up there so then I can stick it up against my box here get the shoulder plane and just trim that part of the tents back so here I'm doing this for the shoulder plane you can also do this with the chisel just by coming in from the side and paring away that material instead but a shoulder plane gives you a little bit more control here if you want to know a little bit more about shoulder planes I did a tall jewel between the Veritas shoulder plane hands of the Lea Neilson shoulder plane so I would look at that if you're stuck between which one to buy or you don't know what to look for in a shoulder plane right okay let's test fit these then oh okay almost there so a little bit more trimming back here today right so now we're approaching the final fit we can start cleaning up these shoulder lines so as about a millimeter of material will have it first right let's test this out then so we know it goes in a certain amount I think that last bit it's just gonna take a little bit of welly so use my split-top on the workbench and whack it into there yeah I'm pretty happy on that so there are a few small gaps on here which is pretty much to be expected with through Tenon's they are I would love to say near enough impossible to get spot I'm sure it is possible to get them spot on but I've never managed one with a perfect fit on there but this is alright once I get it glued together the glue will start filling those gaps the wood will expand so it should look pretty good the only thing I'm going to do before our glue to it is add some little decorative champers to the end of this 10 here to make it a little bit more REM nice to look at so I'm probably just gonna eyeball this to be honest I'm gonna do my block plane on these long sides take a nice even amount of strokes yes six drags looks pretty good cool right I think we're ready to hit this together right so to glue this up I'm going to use my ever trusty Casca might because you know we've got those small gaps on there and this stuff is gap-filling so it is absolutely perfect for that job so I'm going to put a certain amount in there not into a spree load say that much okay little bit of water not too much that might be too much so it's going like breadcrumb a to start with so that's sort of the first stage you know if you keep turning it might eventually turn into a paste yeah starting to go paste like now you can see it will clump in together it's crazy what this stuff does it's changes so quickly all right so now it's like one big bogey so I'm gonna put a bit in this cap first basically you don't want this stuff too thick because if you put it on the shoulder lines it's gonna stop them pressing together it's very difficult to explain the right consistency and it's kind of like trial and error right so I'm going to paint it all over the tenon on all four sides and it's kind of inevitable here that we're going to get some of it on that exposed bit at the end so we'll have to clean that off afterwards so maybe just avoid it with a glue to start with but once it starts pushing through the mortise it's going to end up on there okay so that's all good and then I think I'm going to do a little bit on the exposed end of this mortise as well so any of those small gaps will be hidden so just paste a little bit in there so it's all gonna be pushed to the edge and so I'll put some of the entrance as well just for extra strength right this is going to take some welly to get this in I think it's pretty good all the gaps are filled it has made an absolute mess on the end of that tenon but we can clean it up this the other great thing about casca light is there it cleans up very easily with water also I'm getting black fluff everywhere maybe I'll just stick to the white one I'm more just cleaning off the black fluff then the edge of glue now Oh Lord right so we'll give it that little extra push that it needs with a few cramps to get all of this rubbish away first those both Preston I think that should hold itself in there now while I clean the rest of it out cool so that's pretty much cleaned up so I'll leave it for a few hours and then we'll look at the finished result right so it's been drawing overnight and it's glued up pretty well all of the gaps have closed up there's no issues there whatsoever this shampoo looks nice on top there's no exposed glue I just gave it a quick plane to get it will flush sanded some of the edges ba just take your time with it it is very very difficult to get right you will screw up a lot of them before you get one that actually looks good yeah best of luck with it see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Matt Estlea

Views: 118,031

Rating: 4.8824158 out of 5

Keywords: mortice and tenon, how to cut a mortice, how to cut a tenon, hand cut mortice and tenon, cutting a mortice and tenon by hand, mortice, tenon, mortise, woodworking, woodwork, woodworking joint, woodworking joints, through mortice and tenon, japanese joinery, exposed joinery, diy, craft, build, mortice chisel, hand made woodwork, matt estlea, roubo, workbench, tenon saw, lie nielsen, how to make a mortise and tenon joint by hand, mortice without a drill, hand cut tenon, rycotewood

Id: UD3MkPNN9zo

Length: 29min 51sec (1791 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 09 2018