Mortise and Tenon Joint - Wedged Tenon

hi i'm rob cos and welcome to my shop in this video i'm going to show you how to cut a through wedged mortise and tenon joint it's probably the strongest joint you're ever going to see and you're going to love it i'm rob cosman and welcome to my shop we make it our job to help take your woodworking to the next level if you're new to our channel make sure you subscribe and hit the notification bell which will alert you whenever we release a new video anytime we use a new tool or technique we'll leave a description down below so that make it easier for you to find all right let's get back to work i think a mortise and tenon joint is probably the most common joint in furniture construction and its biggest downfall is you never see it and if you do see it it failed a through wedge tenon or through wedged mortise and tenon is one way of showing off the joint but it also increases the level of strength i think tremendously i'll show you a few examples first of all explain to you what it is so this piece has the tenon and this piece has the mortise and typically a mortise is nothing more than a rectangular shaped hole hopefully the same size as the tenon and the tenon in this case is going to be an extension of this piece only it's going to be a little bit narrower and a little bit shorter so that there is a shoulder all the way around that way when it fits it's nice and tight on the appearance side anyway from here well instead of having a hole or a mortise in this piece that have parallel sides and ends the sides are parallel but the ends are flared so if the opening is uh an inch and a half on this side it might be an inch and three quarter on this side and it's sloped and those slopes need to be nice and straight what you end up doing is taking this piece that has the tenon and before you assemble it you cut slots near the end both ends that come almost all the way down to the shoulder about down in here you put it through in with glue you drive wedges that are the same shape as what would have been the void between this tenon and this now flared opening and by driving in those two pieces those wedges they along with the glue become all one piece other words this this this this and this all become one piece and it fills that interior void of that interior interior dovetail making a very strong joint so here's some examples this is just a little display which is a take on a shaker two-step i made it to display my my dvds when we used to do the wood show circuit and that stretcher on the back is held in place if it was just a regular mortise and tenon well you don't have a whole lot of glue surface and it doesn't have a tremendous amount amount of tensile strength so a regular mortise has a lot of shear strength pushing down like this and preventing twisting but as far as um tensile strength being pulled apart like this it's not terribly strong when you make it a through wedge that adds a whole new dimension and a whole new level of strength to a regular mortise and tenon so there's an example and you get to show it off so we've got maple and walnut and although this has been around a long time and the wood has faded a little bit you can still see it here's a better example this was a walnut nash desk that i made way back in 1980 and what you're looking at here are the sides sitting in a dado underneath but then part of them come all the way through and they're wedged from the top side so that gravity is constantly trying to pull that down this makes for a very strong joint you've got one on each corner for a total of four another example and this is a really good example of where this joint excels is in door construction so you have what's typically called a frame and panel door so it's made like this so that the frame is nice and stable the panel which is solid wood is able to float or expand and contract seasonally without changing or doing anything to the door but instead of just having a typical mortise and tenon joint here i wedged them as well a lot of extra work but makes for an incredibly strong joint so those are some examples of where it's used now i'm going to show you when we i'm going to cut one apart and actually show you what it looks like from the inside and then we're going to go through the whole process of making it i think you're really going to enjoy this well this is kind of like seeing the end of the movie at the beginning but i'm going to show you what this actually ends up looking like so i cut a sample joint put some finish on it just make it stand out a little bit better then i cut it in half so there's what you end up with on the inside of a through wedged mortise and tenon now i'm going to contrast this for a regular mortise and tenon so here we have it this is a rail going into a leg so on this joint you have glue surface effective glue surface on that surface and on that surface and then on that side and on that side the end of both the ends of the mortise are end grain so that doesn't count the end of the tenon is end grain so that doesn't count so it gives you really good resistance to twisting it gives you really good shear strength in terms of force coming down like that but it's somewhat limited in tensile strength where something is trying to pull the joint apart if you contrast that to a through wedge tenon as long as you have a good glue joint between that side of the wedge and that side of the tenon and this side of the wedge and this side of the tenon same thing over here this now becomes all one piece of wood and if you look at how wide it is out here compared to how wide it is in here in order for this joint to fail you've got to figure out a way to pull that great big end through that little tiny opening and the amount of force it would take to do that is going to destroy the whole piece of furniture anyway so although there's long grain end grain long grain end grain you don't gain anything there you do have the long grain here touching the long grain on the other side of the mortise but the biggest advantage of course is that wedging effect that you get with a wider opening at the end than on the inside and the tenon being wider in there to fill that void so super strong joint fun to do and it looks great if you get all of your lines nice and straight and gap free it's a really decorative way to dress up a piece of wood a piece of wood work with just the joinery alone okay i'm going to square up the end of this piece that will be the tenon now if this seems a little bit haphazard it's simply because we're doing this as a demo as opposed to actually building a piece of furniture where we would have very careful placement of the joint okay that's enough of that now to lay it out i'm going to use a pair of dividers i'll use my sliding t-bevel first thing we have to decide is how wide are we going to make the mortise or the tenon whichever way you want to refer to it as and since this piece is going to go into this piece like so then we can keep this as thick as possible remember the joint can only be as strong as the weakest spot so if you put a quarter inch tenon on there you've reduced the thickness of a three-quarter inch piece down to a quarter so the half inch is my biggest mortise chisel so that's what i'll use i'm going to use my marking gauge to determine the length of the jaw of the tenon so if you just made it flush like that when you when you bend those outside pieces with the wedge they'd end up sinking down below the surface so essentially what we're doing is a right angle triangle and i can't remember the name of it but this side is going to be longer than this one and i if i knew anything about math i could use calculation to figure that out but i don't so i'm just going to guess at it so this piece is 7 8 of an inch thick so i'm going to set my marking gauge to be just a little bit beyond that when i say a little bit beyond it's probably not much more than a 30 second oh i'll see if i can measure that and tell you where is it 30 seconds right here can't see it anyway but it looks to be about that so i'll use that to create a shoulder on this piece and you want it nice and deep because you want you've got to come in there and trim that back to the gauge line so the deeper it is the easier it is to follow if you're doing it by hand and for me it's just simply easier to see all right i'll put this in the vice our mortise and tenon joint is literally dictated by our chisel so i'm going to take my mortise gauge and i'll open that up this is one that me and paul friend of mine designed so the cutter backs off allows you to put your mortise chisel between the two cutters then you tighten the outside one and then you tighten this little knurled brass handle and that squeezes the two cutters so that now represents the width of the chisel so i'm going to come over here and i usually just do this one by eye but i want to put that as close to being in the center as possible and the easiest way to check it is to simply push down make a mark and then flip it over to the other side now i'm way off on that one so let's make a little adjustment find a different spot that's really close that'll do so i'll go ahead and lay this out now on a typical marking gauge the bevel causes the tool to be constantly pulled against the face of the head of the tool as you drag it through the wood like that but on this gauge where you have a bevel on either side it cancels out that feature so what you do is hold this side with my left hand and pull it in this direction i start off by just making several light passes until i get a little bit of a line started that will hold the cutter just enough to be able to see and then i'll drop down the face or the edge i should say and same thing over here there now you can't use that to mark the mortise because this style of gauge has the bevel on the outside and you don't want that you need to have nice sharp lines all the way around your mortise so you get a nice tight joint and if you use that gauge to do it you'd end up with a bevel on that side which would show up as a gap which means you have to take off that much more material so instead i use my marking gauge to lay that out and i'll show you how okay so this we'll just go in and identify the waste we'll do a combination of both hand tools and power tools now we haven't determined the length of the tenon yet but i'll just set that aside for a moment now this is where we would come in and we would be very specific on where we're going to place it but like i said this is just a test piece so it doesn't really matter so i'm just going to go in here side we're going to make on the inside we'll have this be the inside so we've been in here i'm just going to leave a mark i'm using a red pen so that we can see a little bit better and about that wide actually let's use a pair of dividers for this just allows us to carry it over a little bit easier i need to have a shoulder with the joints nice and clean on the inside based on that shoulder that you cut allows it to make it nice and tight so i've got about an eighth of an inch on either side so i'm going to leave about the same amount on the edges right about there so i'll put that in place and leave a little mark now while i've got it there i can come in here and identify that and then i can carry it down the face i squared up the end of my board and the shooting board so i know that when i reference my square on here this line i'm drawing will be parallel to the outside edges okay now we'll just take this bring it over here where we're gonna go in this direction doesn't really matter so i'm just going to place it on there and i would be more careful with my lines again we're just doing this as a for a demo i'm going to carry this over better if i could see and i'm going to put this line on here just so that you can follow along with what we're doing in other words we wouldn't normally do this now to make this a little more accurate we'll use that same setting on the dividers [Music] and we'll just connect it here we don't have to do all this it's just hopefully going to help you follow along okay so this is how long our temp mortise is going to be on the inside now we have to decide how long are we going to make it out here otherwise how much slope are we going to have now i just do this one by eye you want enough slope to make the joint relatively strong don't want too much don't want not enough so if we went about like that now the only other thing that you want to consider and it's more aesthetic is in looking at the joint how you've got this rectangle this rectangle this rectangle and then the two down here so you just want to play with those and see what looks right if you want this is the one that's obviously going to stand out the most so do you want that to look really wide in comparison or do you want to be more narrow as long as you've got some slope there it's going to do what you want to do which is hold the joint together so i'm going to set it right about there so i'll draw this line and if you want you can use your sliding t bevel to copy that now if you want to know what that angle is actually yeah we're sitting at about 13 degrees i will carry this over onto the face i really need my magnifiers on this red line is not showing up as well as i would like okay now we'll decide where we're going to place it in relation to the edge i'm going to use my marking gauge and this is going to be the far side i guess right there is good enough so on this which is going to be the show side so i'm going to put face on here we're going to run from the outside line to the outside line and the nice thing about a gauge like this is you can simply roll it to get that last little bit which makes it a lot easier to do than the traditional gauge where as soon as you set the beam on there it hides the pin now on this side and it's really important that this edge be square with these faces so that that ends up in the same spot on the underside this one we're going between the two narrower lines now i don't need to worry about a second one because the chisel will automatically take care of that okay now i'm going to identify i'm just going to put a line an air on here so that you know exactly where we're going we're gonna go all the way to that side and all the way to this one and this pen is not cooperating okay so that's the layout all right we're going to start chopping this on the inside and you can do it freehand which means you're going to chop and you've got to hold that chisel plum and it's got to be right on because you're going to start the process from one side and then you're going to finish it from the other and they've got to meet in the right spot if you want some help what you can do is just get a block of wood and i've squared the face to the bottom side and i just marked that as being the bottom and i'm going to set that on there but before i do i'm going to put a mark on here using my same sliding t-bevel and i'll use this as a guide when it comes time to holding the chisel on that slope now what i've got to do is put that right there right there you'll see how that comes into play shortly i'm not going to use it on this first one we're not going to go very deep we just need to get down in there maybe an eighth of an inch so i'm going to set that on i've got a backup block a piece of wood underneath so i don't cut into my bench and i want to have that perfectly in line with that scribe mark now if you want you can come in here and use your chisel i probably made your mark engaged to help hold that i can even go back here to make it more accurate all right that's right on the line now i'll put a couple of clamps on this so i'm going to start by simply holding the chisel and it's nice because the half inch so i've got a little more width i'm going to hold the chisel tight to this i'm going to stay away from that outside line initially hold the chisel firmly against the block and just give it a whack and then i'll step back maybe oh a little better than a sixteenth of an inch and just make a series of shallow cuts and what this is going to do is going to establish a little trough for me that'll make it easy to keep the chisel in place as we start hitting a little harder and going a little deeper i'll stay away from that outside edge until the very until the very end i'm going to grab a narrower mortise chisel and just come in and get rid of some of that waste if i find a narrower chisel is easier to use because then you're not squeezed between the two sides now when i set my chisel down in there that little trough is going to hold it i can hit that a little harder and as i do just pry back a little bit now because we haven't gone all the way out to the edge i can still pry against that without fear of wrecking something then we'll turn the other way and clean this out i set an eighth of an inch we're down deeper than an eighth okay now i'm going to turn my chisel around and i'm going to work to that edge and i'll set this one right on the line it doesn't really matter but i want to be somewhat plum we'll go over here and do this one i'll do this in two chops instead of one now i might as well just clear that stuff out careful on those outside edges you take little tiny space chops and the pieces of wood just disintegrate if you go too far apart just too much effort too hard to get them cleared now we're going to do is flip this around make sure there's no debris underneath now this time we've got to set it up so that those guidelines match the outside edges of our mortise now we'll just use this to put this in place double check it okay now clamp that okay now i'm going to start at that second line and then i'll save the last bit for for establishing the slope keep it hold it tight against there so that you know you're going to establish a nice clean line on this outside of this close edge same thing as before a bunch of little shallow chops that are only maybe 16th of an inch apart and that'll give you that little trough that'll hold now we'll work back this way okay we're all the way through now we can do i'm going to turn the chisel around i'm going to start chopping on an angle the whole idea is i'm i'm working from i'm working from a solid side into a void that means the chisel is going to easily move into the void and makes the chiseling very simple now i'm just kind of eyeballing that guideline just so that i'm in the ballpark but now that i'm getting really close i'm going to set the chisel right on that outside line i got to put my headgear on i got to be able to see this little better put my chisel right on that outside line and then simply pivot over until i'm lined up with the guideline get it started sorry now as you chop you gotta hold the hold the guide line because you want that you want the slope of the tenon to be straight and straight simply is the shortest distance between two points i lost it again go back in and pick it up this is critical because when you drive the wedge in and it folds that outside piece over if if that slope that we're working on right now were to have a spot where i missed with my chisel and then it changed otherwise instead of being nice and straight it went out and then back in well this would come up tight down here before the gap closes up there if it was undercut slightly if i started too steep and then cleaned it up well actually you really couldn't do that but you know if it's nice and straight when you put the wedge in there's going to be good contact here and you're going to secure that joint even better probably more than you need but may as well have it perfect if you can do it okay so i'm looking down in there and that seems to be nice and straight i don't see any stops and starts one nice pass from top to bottom i'll go over the other side and do the same thing so i'm free or i'm all the way through i should say i'll take about half of that amount make sure you're tight to your guide block pay attention to your guideline i'm going to do this in two all right this would be the last one line that up pivot back so that you're following your guideline on the block light chops to get it started steer it if you have to to keep it on your guideline now as you chop it's going to want to pull forward like that because of the action of the bevel so you're constantly having to pull back when i've had projects where i've had numerous mortises to chop i actually went in and made a guide block that was cut back in like this so that i actually had a sloped wall and i could lay the chisel right against it so i didn't have to fight with trying to move it forward and back and the action of the chisel as i mentioned is constantly trying to bring it forward so you just hold it back against that wall and just keep tapping and it works like a charm in this case i'm all i got is just a pen line i'm so i'm constantly having to pull back all right we're all the way through now let's just free up some of that before we that's all loose take the clamps off now i'll just poke that free [Applause] now there's a little bit right here where obviously i got away from the edge of the guide block but i'll just go in there and shave that off now if that was really bad that would throw off my joint because when your piece comes your tenon comes up tight against this it's going to show as a gap because of that misalignment of the mortise chisel so i'm just going to come in here and pair that a little bit and i'm pairing from the outside toward the inside you do it the other way you risk breaking something off out here and that'll show okay so inspecting this you can take a straight edge and hold it on that slope and if you look closely i've got a little bit of a bump right at the bottom so i've got to go in and fix that on this side it's okay and i'm a little bit shy of coming right to the opening but it's close enough that it's not going to be an issue same on that side so we'll come in here this is where you need to have your chisel really sharp because you're trying to hold you're trying to get your chisel to bite into that end grain wall there that's clean i think this side is okay yeah it is all right next move we're going to cut the tenon to fit so my next step is to come in and to cut this cheek so i'm going to use my chisel and i'm going to cut a little trough we're going to cut the long cheeks off first using cutting a little trough up against that gauge line and that'll just give me a place to rest my saw and help get it started so what i'm going to do is go to the far side now i'm going to put a little extra light on this so i need to have a nice straight line across the top down the face so what i'm going to do is come in here the teeth of the chisel or the teeth of the saw sitting in that little trough up against that shoulder and i can i can tell when it's touching it's not touching there and it is touching there but rather than try to make a cut starting a cut along that big long line i'm going to tip it forward start on the far side [Music] all right now i got that line created on the top and this is a little bit of a small piece so i'm going to actually tip it a little bit so i can see that line better that's more than i would want careful not to go below your line now i can use that as a guide to help keep the saw tracking and i'm because this piece on the outside is so thin i'm pushing against it and what that does is just squeeze the blade between that little flap of wood and the tenon that we're keeping and it helps to hold that blade online i'm watching my baseline go too low all right we'll do the same thing on the other side i'm just going to go in here and cut my little trough okay next thing i'm going to use my bench hook and a small joinery cross cut saw and you can do the same thing on this as well if you want meaning you can go in now we got to do that up against the bench dog go in and cut that little trough another reason to have a deep gauge line this only takes half a minute or so you really want to have a nice clean shoulder line that's what shows on the finished joint so we'll come in here cross-cut teeth are different than rip they've got sharp points row with them on one side one side and a row on the other side so what you want to do is get in there and get that to lay right against that shoulder hold your saw plumb if you saw slopes at all it's going to show on this side [Music] clear the sawdust off the teeth now i made a few little errors that we're going to have to go in and fix but that's all right give me the opportunity to show you i'm gonna go in here and take my chisel i'm gonna grab one it's a little bit wider i'm just gonna clean that up finish that with that saw i didn't saw all the way down so i can just come in here holding the chisel tight against the cheek just finish that cut actually went a little bit deep there now here's the part i was talking about if you look on this side it did a pretty good job of holding right on that line but if we look over here actually it's on this one i did i left just a little bit of material you have to get the camera just right in order to see it but there's just a little bit of a ledge right there well that would prevent that from sitting nice and tight against the face of the board with the mortise in it so what i'm going to do switch chisels yet again come in here put that chisel right down there so i can feel that little ledge and keep the chisel level and just finish that cut clean those corners check the other side that actually wasn't as bad as i thought i'm using a 17 degree chisel which is fragile in hardwoods but it does such a wonderful job in areas like this particularly going through that end grain now i actually have a little ledge right there i can feel it so when i pull my chisel out like this i feel it drop down and that little ledge that it's sitting on is what the marking gauge left well that should be where that should be with my shoulder line but it's not i left a little bit of material above the saw so that's where i'm going to go in and pair straight across that's not quite as sharp as i would like okay now we'll come in here and we'll use a combination square and the reason is i want to be able to have a where's my red pen i want to be able to have the blade come right down to here can't do that with a regular square but you can do it with a combination square so now we've got some more work to do with this but i want to teach it in such a way that it's easier to follow i want this to stand plumb because i've got to come in here and i've got to make these cuts and if i'm my border standing plum it's going to be a lot easier for me to make a plum cut because gravity is going to teach that i'm going to grab yet another saw now this cut needs to be nice and square because this is going to show what we're doing right now is we are cutting this end of the tenon so if it isn't a nice straight cut it's going to show a gap there or this rectangle is not going to be a rectangle it will be sloped on one side so i need to make sure that that is done accurately i switched to my dovetail side just because i have a little more control because of the size of it right up against that red line and we want a nice plum cut careful as you get to the bottom you don't want to breach those shoulders that would show on the outside now we're going to fit this tenon into the narrow opening first if we were to cut those parts that are going to fall the um wedge out then becomes too fragile to work with you'll see as we go through this why i say that i'm going to turn this on its edge on its side pardon me and i just line up the edge of that with that racing stripe on my bench and i know that it's level cut my little chamfer against the line now stand that up better to leave that just a little bit short so that you don't end up breaking through this side it's a quick fix with the chisel okay do i see a little bit of debris right there now we don't know if these sides are parallel to the outside face they need to be and this needs to be uniform thickness across its width and we've got to make sure that we have a nice tight fit on the inside so before we do anything with the wedge we've got to come in here and fit this to the opening yeah that's a little bit tight flip it around and see now what i really want is a perfect fit on this side so let's try it over here and that's pretty close i would typically go for a little tighter fit on on a through wedge tenon than i would on a regular mortise and tenon regular mortise and tenon if it's too tight all the glue gets forced to the bottom in this case we need to have a nice tight fit out here so i'll sacrifice a little bit of that which compensated for by the wedging action now what i'm going to do this that's not as smooth as i was like so i'm going to go in i'm going to clean this up i just want to make sure that that surface is parallel with this one so you don't need to use a screwdriver in here but i'd like to have it a little bit more secure than what i can get with just a thumb screw now we want to make sure now when we use this tool there's a lot of force trying to pull it this way so i have to apply a lot of extra force with my left hand keeping that surface tight to the face of this piece with the tendon in it that's not too bad let me just check a low spot now because i don't know if that marking gauge was perfectly centered or mortise gauge i should say i'm going to reset this over here a little thick on this side so i'm going to come over here and reference my cutter [Music] okay i won't take off any more than that sure we still have our fit now when we put that in there we have a nice tight shoulder all the way around so here's the part where you need to determine what you want in the look of your joint and what i mean by that is do you want this rectangle to be wider or narrower in relation to the rest of it you have to decide that i kind of like the proportions i have right here so i'm going to mimic something very similar to this so that means i'm going to put my saw cut about maybe a little more than a sixteenth of an inch in from the end i actually think i'll go a little bit bigger than that right there so leave a mark referencing off the outside edge in both leave a mark now we'll come in and we'll square a line nice thing about the dividers you just put the pen in the hole move your your square up to it strike your line now over here what we need to do actually i'll do it on this side to make it easier to see we need to make a sloping cut from here almost to the edge if we make it straight down and then drive the wedge in that's going to force this piece to break there's a slight risk that the split will go up through here if we do it so that it's really close that'll be enough the wood will bend we don't want to be too close because we don't want that piece falling off and that just complicates the construction process because now you're looking for that little piece of wood that you don't know where it went so i'm going to go about right there it doesn't really matter that they both be identical because that's not going to be seen okay i'll turn this on this side so i can see it this is another one of those cuts that has to be perfect because how square that is determines how well it's going to fit and show on the outside so i'm going to get my light shining on so i can i'm going to cut on the inside of that mark get that perfectly square across the end [Music] and then do your best to follow that sloping cut from our mark [Music] careful not to go beyond your shoulders it's a little bit heavy but it'll be all right helps to push against that little wedge so it holds it in place and doesn't allow the saw to move side to side and both of those are a little bit heavier than i was aiming for but they'll bend without risking a split now i'm just going to clean up that fuzz on the back side i have a piece of aspen i'm going to use for the wedge and the reason is it's a nice contrast to the walnut i've got it close to fitting but i'll i'll dress that up just a little bit once we've actually cut the wedge out now i want the end to be nice and square i can cut a wedge from either side it's going to just cut down on the amount of work i have to do all right now we have to determine the length and i'm going to make the length the same length that the tenon is so i've got my setting that i still have on my marking gauge and i'll scribe a line all the way around the end of this piece now we have to determine how wide it needs to be so you're going to wrap your head around this mass we have to fill that gap plus that saw kerf and that saw kerf so we can come in here and measure this distance this distance right here is the difference between this opening and this opening and then to that we're going to add a saw kerf which is right about there and if we would rather be a little fat than a little thin but not too much because we want that when we assemble it we want contact all good glue surface contact all the way down both sides of the wedge so in from either end we'll leave a little mark and then square a line just like with everything else this has to be square good sharp edges in order for this to show well now our slope and if we want to do this accurately we don't want that to come to a point we want that to come to the width of the saw kerf at the bottom i know that's taking it to the extreme but again if you want to fill that the way it should that's what we need to do we can trim it a little bit on the shooting board now put that in more careful sawing just keep that square across the end and do your best to follow that line that might be a little heavy but to clean that up i'm getting a little bit off so i'm going to come back here tilt my twist my saw just a little bit so i can alter that angle left at both of them a little bit heavier than i need so i'm going to fix them that might be easier done in this bench hook this time we're cutting below the line or not using that little trough method for that reason now i'm going to use my little bench hook and my block plane just because small pieces i can get my the support of my fence is really close so it's going to make this a lot easier to do first thing we want to do is get these to fit you don't want them too wide you too wide it interrupts that line it sticks out on either side so it's got to be just the right width and that one actually is really good how about this one and that is too they don't have to be touched that way so the only thing we need to do then is just go in there and clean them up a little bit and when i say clean them up they're a little bit fat down here if you look at the saw curve you look at the size of the saw curve and then you compare that you can see how wide it is so this is a little bit tricky what i need to do i don't want to alter the thickness up here so i'm going to start planing here and i'll go down and go down and go down go down avoiding up here until my very last pass which will go from here right to the end and i'm up above i don't set it down on the shooting board i'm holding it up here just so that i can put pressure right in the middle if you were to hold it down there in the process of pushing in it i tend to have i find you have a tendency to wear a plane away the top instead of the bottom so this just gives me a little more control so i'm starting right there and i'll flip it over and make sure that this is staying these surfaces are staying parallel to each other you could use a little more blade compare okay i'm a little fat on the top so what i'll do is just alter where i put the pressure that's better now we'll make one or two passes that go full length oops okay that one is good same thing on this one we want that's a right angle triangle so we want the long side out here if you put the short side out here there's a chance that that'll end up below the surface when we tap it in so we'll put it together like that and the long side of this one is here so that'll go together like that actually that's just a little bit snug i'm going to take a pass that's better that's the long side and that's the long side so it's going to go on just like that let's set them right there now you can't put any glue on this if you do it's going to end up in the shoulder and the ins and then you're going to have to come in here and try to clean out all and around there which is a pain that's unneeded typically i would go in and hand plane that so it's all finished and of course the sides and the edges of this need to be hand planed before you assemble in other words you're trying to work into a vertical surface and that won't happen put as much glue as we want in here within reason because it'll all come up to the surface and we can clean it off so i'm going to go in i like this little spatula because it allows me to very accurately place my glue i'm putting on just a nice coat that's evenly dispersed you've got to place glue where you want it it's not going to find its way there on its own and just for good measure i'm going to coat those ramps now the only other thing we're going to have to glue is we have to glue the wedges but we'll wait until we get them just about ready to put in place now i need a chisel just in case i have to open up that wedge or that gap so i can get the wedge in now make sure that's seated we'll go in here just push that over okay glue both sides of both surfaces of the of the wedge make sure we got the long side out now as we tap these in we want to tap them at the same rate if you put one in farther than the other and it comes tight then you're going to have a narrow looking wedge on one side if we needed to we could come in with a block and come right up against that now we'll take a quick peek underneath shoulders nice and tight all the way around normally we'd give that some time to dry but we can do it right now and i can tell the look of the walnut that we need to be planting in this direction now you might want to come in depending on how the fit went and put a little bit of pressure if it's close to the edge you can do it if it's in the middle a joint you can't but you can squeeze that if you have to let's clean that off and see how it [Music] looks so there's your through wedge tenon hi if you like my work if you like my style of teaching click on any one of these videos to help take your woodworking to the next level and i've always said better tools make it a whole lot easier if you click on the icon with the plane and the chisel it'll take you to our website introduce you all of our tools and also talk to you about our online and in-person workshops good luck in your woodwork

Channel: RobCosman.com

Views: 125,973

Keywords: mortise and tenon joint, wedged mortise and tenon joint, mortise and tenon, mortise and tenon by hand, wedged mortise and tenon, wedged mortise and tenon by hand, wedged mortise and tenon joinery, wedged mortise and tenon mallet, wedged through mortise and tenon, rob Cosman, Woodworking

Id: VE11nB4pnhM

Length: 60min 11sec (3611 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021