How to Use a Mortise Gauge

hello welcome back to the shed if you've seen my last video on how to use a mic engage correctly this is following on from that and I'm going to show you obviously how to use a mortise engage today it's another pretty straightforward technique but all of you beginners out there that want to do mortices and 10 and joinery you really need to learn how to do it it's quite fundamental to know how to mark them correctly now you could do them without the marking gauge but to get two parallel lines on a piece of wood without the marking gauge becomes quite tricky if you're freehanding it and you've only got one reference Edge and one reference face becomes very difficult because if you're trying to use a square you need to make sure you've got square and grain for doing that and a lot of the times your Timber's not Square unless you put it on a shooting board so if you want to learn about how to make your own shooting board I've left that link down below for you for the sake of today's demo I'm going to be using this 19 millimeter board into this 35 millimeter board we're going to be pretending that I'm going to be joining this board to this one using a mortise and Tenon so for the sake of this I'm just going to be marking the mortise because the same techniques apply when you make the Tenon so to make it easier for today's video I'm just going to be marking the straight 19 mil from this board straight on to the mortise gauge so let's jump in and we'll get to it before I jump in I just want to let you know that there are more different styles to what I've got here this is one with a little twisting bit here which does make it a lot easier to set your markings between your dual pins on the back here some of them just have a sliding bit and they can still slide when the fence is locked down so if you can get a hold of these with the twisting threaded mechanism that's going to make it a lot easier the other thing is you can get attachments for some of the wheel gauges that have a double wheel and you can use them for doing the same thing I said we were going to be having this as our mortise gap of 19 mil so what we have to do is first of all is loosen off our fence get that out of the way now on these ones you don't want it locked down because it holds on this little bar here which moves when you thread when you turn this thread so you want to keep that out of the way and not lock down you want it loose but just out of your way first of all we want to be looking at these pins because this style is a double pin and we want to twist this open and start moving them so when I twist back here you can see that those pins are moving apart now just like when I showed in the other video you want to take the marking from the top of the pin on both of these so if we want 19 mil we're obviously looking straight down on top from pin to pin so I'm going to go ahead and just open this up try and Eyeball 19 mil and now I'm going to come in and that is about 17 mil so I need to go a little bit further and just a titch further it's a little bit of a dancing game to get this right now not sure if you can see that on camera that Gap there it's about 19 mil now the other test that you can do is come in and put your piece of wood there and you'll see that it's sitting just inside the points which is what you want it's telling you that that is the exact thickness that you want because you need the hole to be slightly larger than what you're using to mortise so if those pin tops if the tops of the pins the wood sits just inside them or whatever you're using that is the correct measurement now on the ones that don't have this threaded thing here you would want to come in and keep that fence locked down to actually hold it to stop this bottom piece sliding we need to obviously find the center of this board from the fence use the same technique that I showed you before with putting the pins in it does work but you're going to leave a lot of ugly marks on your board but you can do it that way and I'll just quickly show you that you can now obviously I had my first set that went here and the other set there means that I have to tap it a little bit further away from me so you can still tap on top of that that doesn't stop that and then you can put one Mark there come in from the other side again nope still not quite there another light tap further apart and now I've come straight back in on top of that and now I've found the middle of where those pins are going to sit now that's one way of doing it but you can see you get a lot of marks on your board and while you might hand plan over this if you've already finished this ready to do your joinery if you've already smoothed it out you might not want to do that and you might not want to end up with all these ugly dots from making mistakes so in some cases I find that it's best that you go ahead you do your layout first and then you come in on top of those lines so then you can actually just line them straight up with a quick eyeball and you're going to be good to go now if you're not finding dead center then you definitely want to be marking them on your board with your um you're square and things like that or your ruler to make sure you get them exactly where you want it and then you can run straight on those lines and adjust your fence to that and you're going to get these two parallel lines that have been set up with the mortise pins now just like with the single pin we want to make sure that we're coming in and we want to angle it down so we're just touching we want to have the same sort of hold kind of like that and you want to roll it pull gently roll pull gently sometimes with these I find it helps to use two hands as you can see here and you just slowly put them in deeper and now we can see if I just run the pencil in those lines we just did we have our nice parallel lines here and we're good to go ahead and cut our mortise out on that now so there you go folks with a little bit of fiddling around you can obviously still use the same techniques learned from the single pin marking gauge to find the center where you're going to put it if you're going dead center but I do recommend that you do use the pants on the market it's just going to make it that little bit easier and quicker and less marks on your wood however that might not matter if you're using a Tenon that's got big shoulders on it which most of them should so that should cover most of that marking and if it's on the inside of your joinery you're probably never going to see it anyway so it's up to you as to which way you go ahead to actually Mark your mortise on there but the techniques of setting up between the pins to get your parallel lines with the mortise gauge is the best way to do it whether it is with this pin style or the wheel style so if you like this video please consider liking and subscribing down here it really does help the channel out if you'd like to support me a little bit further please consider checking out on patreon links in the description below and if you like the technique that you're seeing with the mortise gauge here today and you'd like to see some more techniques for the beginner to help you out with any sort of woodworking techniques please check out the videos on the screen here right now bye for now

Channel: Aussie Woodshed

Views: 5,989

Keywords: aussiewoodshed, Handtool woodworking, Hand-tool woodworking, Restorations, furniture builds, tutorials, woodworking tools, marking gauge, carpentry tools, mortise gauge, tutorial, how to, mortise and tenon, mortise and tenon joint, mortice and tenon, mortise, mortice, How to use a mortise gauge, how to use a mortise gauge correctly, what is a mortise gauge, woodworking tutorials, hand cut joints, woodworking layout tips, mortise gauge tips, mortise gauge tutorial

Id: cvJ4rVeO8AA

Length: 8min 2sec (482 seconds)

Published: Thu May 18 2023