Mortise & Tenon Joinery on the Router Table

[Music] hi I'm Steve I currently don't have any projects going on the shop right now I've got some in the planning stages I'm putting tools away from demo I did yesterday at marks machinery and Fort Smith and I thought might be a perfect opportunity to make it make a few videos and the demo I did was on the router table and one of the aspects of that was making a mortise and tenon joints on a router table would I know this allows the color match but I do have some leftover demo materials and I'm going to use this and and some other materials and I'll show you how to make this mortise and tenon joint on the router table first thing I want to do is Mark the center of the apron what I'm going to do is that I set my fence fixed at the center of my bit is here now by you know you can you can usually really do a good job of seeing exact line on that mark up with the center of your sin of your bit just just based on the milling marks see if I can zoom in here okay so over here I've got the center of my bit lined up with the center of the mark now if I left it that way and I milled the Moors in my leg this space would be flush with that edge but I want to refit I want reset approximately 1/8 of an inch so I'm going to use a spacer and this is eighth inch Baltic birch ply and I'm just going to leave my fence a little loose here set my backup and lock the fence in place okay so I've got my masking tape and be quite honest with you the cheaper the better on this because the cheaper tapes doesn't stick very long and I'm just going to mark this lay it on the outside and you could mark the fence but what I'm going to be doing is dropping the leg down from the top and you won't be able to see the marks on the fence okay so it takes down on the table now if you to do this I'll bring up a bit to where I've got because this is a spiral bit there's a cutting edge exposed all around and the best way to mark that what I'm going to do is Mark the leading trailing edge so I'm just going to take my workpiece which are my apron which I know is square I'm going to put it up against the spiral bit and that's the leading edge mark that square here and that's the trailing edge of my bit take your leg and your apron I'm not going to measure this I'm just going to mark it directly off my workpiece so I'm going to use wipe it white pencil here just lightly mark it for that apron ass I'm going to go three-eighths of an inch I'm going to make a mark from the top for the bottom and the top and these are the good bit these are going to be the limits of where my mortise is you can take a regular square or what I like to use is a saddle square and I'm going to use this saddle square to put these the limits of the mortise I'll mark that all the way around on the leg and this enables either to just with one positioning mark both to two sides at once okay so I put the marks all the way around the leg and while I'll use when I drop this down to milk mortises I know while my starting edge will be on the trailing edge of my bit and then I'm going to move it up to where it gets to the next mark on the masking tape and moves line up I can pull it back and I'm going to pull it off a bit so now that my my fence is set for where my mortise will be located back here and I've got the extents of my mortise based on the leading trailing edges of the bit I'm about ready to start cutting but to to avoid confusion what I'm going to do is I'm going to choose alright where do I want my mortises if you don't mark this out for me I'm always messing it up some way so you know I have miss cut mortises before I've done it with a domino so so I'm going to take a crown or piece of chalk or whatever and I'm going to mark the two faces of the two locations approximately where the morris will be [Music] ah [Music] [Music] okay so I've got the the data and planing bits set up in the machine the fence reset it clears and I'm I've got the the depth of the cuts in the fence approximately a one-inch you don't want it more than an inch because I only I don't I don't want it to bottom out before the cheeks close on the on the leg so from what what we have here we've got our board and from before I have zero point eight four six inches because the thickness of the board I cut a fifth 5/16 inch mortise so that should be pretty close to about point three one three one seven three one five so that's the width of my mortise so what I want to do is take out enough of this on both sides to get that tenon to be 0.315 inches so how do I do that I take my eighth point or point eight four six minus zero point three one five and I apologize for the clarity of this and to avoid math errors I like to use my calculator here Oh point five three zero point five three one inches so that's the total amount of material left to take off the full thickness but since I'm going to divide it by two on each side I want to divide that by two and I am zero point two six five inches okay I wanted to point two six five inches right now in point one nine four so now I'm just going to raise the bit to where I get point two six five and I'm point two six five inches above the zero on the table this is a jig I constructed from my shaver which is perfect for this application so piece of scrap plywood and pieces of 2x4 and this this jig we've got some pressure-sensitive adhesive paper on the front of this jig is what I use on the shaper to knotch the back of drawers for the bloom or hedge Quadro or blend tandem slides [Music] ah [Music] [Music] oh yeah just that was just perfect so now I can't all I know is that my Tenon's the right thickness I mean I don't have any wiggle room side to side so now what I need to do is trim the top and bottom so now we'll go back to our setup here if I did not have sandpaper on this I would be using some spring clamps to clamp this apron to it and this is an operation similar to knots in the back of drawers for us for the tandem slides [Music] Oh [Applause] [Music] okay now we're at the point where we have the almost the proverbial square peg in a round hole but I should be pretty bloomin close here so I've got two choices here I can either square square the tenants in the leg or you can square the mortises in the leg or round over the tenon on the apron it's a lot easier rent over the 10 on the apron so I'm going to show you how to do that the easiest way to do this is at the I've got this put in the tail voice chisel and sandpaper now a chisel is I'm going to go into each of here be careful when you point this thing at at you and what I'm going to do is just knock off the sharp corner so I've got less work to do with sandpaper and angle it a little more or make it a better angle okay so I've got this partially really sharp corners knocked over this is 80 grit paper this is a wood tarnished paper it's very flexible perfect for this job it doesn't take much I'm going to turn this thing around get just easier to pull it toward me then I just push away from me have a little more control now turn them up square pages to and make it not square of it right now do you have some buzzing I still um like yet on a router let's see how it is okay for that time make more content and Joey I mean this is this is one of the better fits it's not quite as tight as a domino joint but it works really well now you will see the bottom of the tenon in this other mortise what you can do is take a pencil put in here and mark it off and take this T there's a miter saw or table saw and put a miter on that for the opposing tenon let's see how it looks on this fits on this side too and if they're equally as well oh I thank you for watching if you've got any questions or comments I appreciate them and thank you for your subscriptions have a great day

Channel: ExtremeWoodworker

Views: 152,047

Keywords: Router Table, Mortise & Tenon, Joinery, Domino, iGaging, Router, DIY, Home Improvement Technique, Build Furniture

Id: RL7QrGLNmKE

Length: 15min 59sec (959 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 02 2017