The Art of Woodworking - Episode 3: Mortise and Tenon

hi I'm Phil lo this is the furniture Institute of Massachusetts and this is the art of woodworking [Music] in this episode what I like to show you is some you know talk about some chisels and the different types of chisels that we use when we're doing different types of woodworking processes and also I'm going to show you how to do mortise and tenon joints this in this episode as well let's talk about some more some different types of chisels to begin with if you look at the the bench here what you'll notice is that I have an array of different chisels they're you know different types of chisels for different purposes and these two these three chisels that we have here are what they call firmer chisels in the way that we determine those is by the square edge and they're relatively wide and they have about a about a 25 degree bevel on them now this is really what they call a framing chisel it's a lot more stout it has a leather washer in here it has also what they call a Tang which is a sort of a sharpen point that goes into the handle but you also notice that the handle has this ring on the end so if I want to do really aggressive cuts you know it will prevent the the handle from splitting okay a couple of the chisels that we have here are what they call bench chisels and you'll notice that these bench chisels have these bevels on them and these are designed so that you can get into really tight places in the case you have an angle like on a dovetail or something like that you can work right up against the the really sharp corner and all these chisels what you'll see is different ways in which they attach the handles as well the handles on these Firma chisels or what they call Tang you know attachments and these are what they call socket attachments here where you know that the handle actually goes into a conical shape opening in the end of the the chisel itself then we also have these a real refined chisel that you see here which is actually a paring chisel and this is one that I actually made out of an old jointer knife and put a handle on and this one here we don't use with any any type of mallet or hammer or anything like that it's all done strictly by hand and then we have these three chisels here well actually these four chisels these are really interesting chisels these are some antique mortising chisels and as you can see these are really designed to do some really you know aggressive work the handles on them are really big and heavy and I particularly like this one because this all the facets that are on it you can actually see that this was hand in hand shaped with a plane and so forth but again these are Tang chisel so that it has this bolster or this this rounded area so that when you drive you know with a mallet you know that's going to actually you know transfer the you know the the works down into what you're really trying to chop and these three particular ones have three different sizes we have a 3/8 inch wide one a quarter-inch wide one or 5/16 and then 1/8 inch wide one so depending on the size of the mortise that we want to cut will really depend on the one that we choose now this is a contemporary mortising chisel that is made by Lee Neilson as you can see it's a little not quite as stout as the others but it does the work just as well one of the other things that you'll also notice is the the way that these are sharpened then they don't really have a huge hollow grind like you see on this one it's much more you know straight or curved type of bevel that's put on it and the very end of it is really the only thing that gets sharpened so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to talk to you a little bit about mortise and tenon joints and a mortise and tenon is basically an opening that's chopped or into the into a new leg like this cabriole leg here and then you have a a tenon that fits in to that mortis that like you see here and this is a way that they used to join you know pieces and parts together and it's a really important joint in furniture making because it's you so exclusively to you know actually join two parts together okay I'm going to just show you a little drawing about a mortise and tenon joint and if you look closely here what we have is an author graphic projection which means that we have a front view a plan view and a right end view so we're looking at the the mortise and tenon from the the end of this you'll notice that I have a bare-faced tenon which means that the tenon comes directly off of the bottom of this board that it's attached to and then we have a couple other terms that we would like you to know about which is the the tenon cheeks which is the two sides the wide size of the the tenon and then we have the tenon shoulders which are the parts that actually butt up against the the leg then we have the right the style and the rail and that would be for a door of some sort well what I'd like to do now is just to show you how I'd go about laying out a mortise and tenon I have a sample here that I'll use and well let's just talk a little bit about where mortise and Tenon's are actually used if we look at this table down here this table was constructed with mortise and tenon joints as well so you know the side rail going into the two legs has a mortise and tenon joint on it and then these in these dividers here and here have a what we call a twin tenon so you have I have a couple examples of those and you'll notice that you know we have just a basic tenon here which has the three shoulders its barefaced on the bottom so we have the tenon with the three shoulders on here we have the mortise here and then we can also have what they call it a twin tenon which is a tendon two tendons that are actually side by side you can see that and that actually is designed so that when the the rail is put into position that it doesn't twist we have a also a decorative mortise and tenon here which is used in a lot of Chinese style furniture which is the mortise and tenon with a mitered shoulder and then we can also have some unusual Tenon's where if you look at this one it actually has an angle to the rail so when the mortise is actually cut you can see that it has an angle on it so what I have here is this sample of this chair I'm going to take it apart so that you can actually see how it's it's put together the back has been glued up on this but if you look I can take off the crest rail which has a couple of mortise and Tenon's here here and for the splat the splat is actually mortise and tenon into the back rail with this stub tenon on either end and if I take the rails in the stretches out you'll notice that each one of these has a you know an angled tenon on it as well as a twisted Tennant which is the one of the difficulties in chair making the front rail is mortise Intendant into here you can see the four mortises that go into the legs for the stretches and the side rails and then we have the side rails that go into these mortises in the back and the interesting things about these is that they actually a twisted and angled in order to fit into the mortises of the back post so you know this is is completely joined here and we you know this is really the best type of construction that you can find on any type of furniture so what I'd like to do now is show you how to layout a mortise and tenon I have what I would call a leg for a table of some sort and then I also have a rail in what I want to do is to try to get this piece to fit inside of this piece over here and to do that I'm going to start off by trying to chop out the mortise but I have to do a layout first and the layout lines are really the most important thing here because if I can lay out the lines really accurately and cut to those lines you know the joint is going to fit perfectly so to start off with what I'll do is I'll take the rail size and I'll put it up against the top of the leg and align it and then take a knife and make make a small knife cut across here and then take a square and transfer that to the other side here so this is where the mortise is actually going to stop on the bottom then I'm going to go ahead and take a marking gauge and I'm going to set it for a one-inch mark so I'll actually take and set it at one-inch and I'm just going to put a little mark right here and then I'm going to take the square and I'm going to work my way around the this blank now you notice that I have a line here and a little so this is my flat surface this is my square edge now one thing I'd like to show you is that we need to wrap a shoulder up line around here and when we wrap the shoulder line we have to keep the head of the square only on two surfaces we want it on this one surface in one edge and if we do that we'll be able to make sure that the lines that we wrap around will meet up almost every time and this is a pretty good example of how I can demonstrate that if you'll take a look at this this board he you'll notice that I have playing quite a curve into the edge of it and with that curve in the edge of it if I actually start laying out a line which might be a shoulder line off of this curved edge and I put a pencil line across here and then I go to the other side and I keep working my way around you're going to notice that what happens on this edge here you can see that the lines don't match up now if I only use this angle of this curved surface for with the head of my square against it and I only use one surface to lay it out off of with the broad surface I put a line across there and then again if I use that curved surface and bring my pencil line across like so and then across this side you're going to notice that the line actually matches up so that shows you that if you use a reference edge in one reference surface you can still get the lines to line up all right all right so let's try and put that do apply that to this so I have two lines I always mock my material with lines that are the square corner in a flat surface so the head of my square is only going to go against this edge and against that surface so since I put that one-inch mark here I'll take my knife and one of the things that you want to notice is that I have a single beveled knife and it's flat on one side and has the bevel on the other and the way that I hold the knife when I actually cut the shoulder line when I bring that knife across since this is the flat surface that's a perpendicular cut and the angle is to the wayside which is going to get cut away so I'm going to go ahead and snug that up right against there now I'm going to make sure I put the head of my square against this flat surface and bring that line across like so and then again I'm going to make sure the head of the square goes against the reference edge and across this way and then again the head of the square goes against the reference face and I'll have a nice line that matches up all the way around now I'm going to go ahead and take my marking gauge this is where I'm actually going to lay out the where that mortise is like located and also the tenon is located and when we do that we also only work off of one surface and we work from the outside to the first wall of the mortise and then set it up and lay it out to the second wall of the mortise and what I mean by that is I take the the marking gauge and I'll you know choose a dimension the dimension doesn't really matter that much Co and what I'm going to do is I'm going to scribe a line from the end of the board down to my scribe line but with the same setting now with the same setting I'm actually going to lay out the first set of lines for the tenon as well so if I line these up now with the the outside edge against the leg you'll notice that the line those two lines are exactly in the same spot and you know that's really important to make the fit of the the tenant now I'll go ahead and do a second line which you now I usually like to like make them more than if I'm chopping mortises by hand I like to make the mortise a little bit wider than what my mortise chisel is going to be so that I can come back and straighten the walls the mortis so the second mark will go on here again I'm working off of the same outside surface and the same outside surface of the for the tenon I'm going to run this back now a good dimension to sort of keep in mind is that if you make the tenon one-third the thickness of the material that's approximately the thickness of the tenon that you would like to have and you also want to be careful to make sure that the wall of the mortise isn't necessarily too close to the outside of the of the leg because if it gets racked at all can have a tendency to break all right so one last line that we have to put in here for the mortise is we don't want the mortise to come right out through the top of the leg so if we come down approximately a half-inch I'll just measure this done a half inch here and put a mark there I'm going to bring my line across like this now one thing that you'll notice and a lot of woodworkers do this is they will scribe this line with a marking gauge off of the end of the board and that isn't necessarily a good practice to sort of you know employ because if you happen to have an angle on the end of a board like you see here if I ran my marking gauge along that angled edge I would end up with an angled shoulder and if I cut to those lines what will happen is the leg will actually go together and be at an angle like you see here and unless we're trying to put a splay on on the leg then we don't want that to happen we want if we want to we want a line that's going to be you know perpendicular to a straight edge which will bring the leg you know right down square and perpendicular to the floor okay so these are all laid out now so I'm going to go ahead and show you how I chop the mortise I'm going to go over to the corner of the bench here all right what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go ahead and chop a mortise and we have to hold this bent this piece down to the the bench top as firmly as possible and the way that I do that is I like to use a clamp and I love these Joe Genson style clamps because they you know hold really well a lot of people have a little bit of difficulty using them but if you you know grab the the clamp the same way every time and personally what I do is I put this this handle and this upper handle in my right hand if I rotate this in one direction you can see that the clamp actually is is closing up and if I rotate it in the other direction it's opening it up and it's also parallel so what I want to do is I want to open this up to get it close to the dimension that I need then I'm going to bring this over the bench and I'm going to go ahead and snug that up and I always tighten it with the back piece here and I want to make sure that these these jaws are perfectly parallel if they happen to be pinching you know the clamp will move really quite easily or if they're pinching in the other direction you know it's not going to hold the parts snugly so what I need to do is make sure that that's perfectly parallel and then I tied it tighten it down a little moisture on my hand get an extra quarter turn out of it now I'm going to go ahead and take this mortise chisel and I'm going to begin by chopping approximately 1/8 of an inch or or so away from the described line that I made and the other thing that I do when I chop these mortises as I always stand you know in this position here so that I can see how vertical or chisel is it doesn't really matter too much if the chisel is angled in this direction to begin with because I'm away from the scribe line but it is necessary to be square when I'm looking at it from this direction because otherwise you know when I go to fit the mortise the tenon into the more it'll come off at an angle so I'll go ahead and try to Center the chisel you notice that I have the flat towards the the the scribe line and if I'm a little bit close to the scribe line I can do what you call walk the chisel so if I tilt it and twist it in my hand like so I can actually move it along to wherever I need it to be without really lifting it up and it makes a little easier to get it in place now I'm going to stand back and make my first shop and then I'm going to spin the chisel around and when I make my chop this way what you're going to notice is it pushes the material that's on the bevel side in that direction that's actually splitting it along the sidewalls and if you give it a little push in one direction towards the part that you chop it will actually help to relieve the chip and we'll just keep going until we get close to the end and I'm going to come to within about an eighth of an inch on this end as well and the reason for that is I need to sort of leaver these this material out of here now and if I don't do that I'm going to bruise you know the edge if I go right up to the line get rid of most of this then we'll do the same thing over again but we can be a little bit more aggressive now because we have to you know be able to go down about an inch so give that a good whack push it now free up some of those that material let them shopping you notice that I'm not being too gentle here just going to get that work done quickly now if I need to Lycans I can take my square and I can measure the depth by pushing this down inside of the opening and that tells me that I'm about halfway there so we'll just continue okay getting close so far we made it on that one we're probably a little bit about another eighth of an inch or so to go all right this should take care of it okay that's right at about an inch so that's where we need to be now what I need to do is I'm going to go ahead and change the position of this so you can see a little bit better what I'm doing I need to chop to the lines on at the ends of the mortise now and what I mean by that is I need to go ahead and put my chisel right in the scribe line now you notice also that I am you know chopping and I'm able to look at the you know this edge of the chisel to see that that's perfectly perpendicular to my work we'll just chop down this way let me do the other side and I'll try to clean that out now without really marring up the ends if we can help it okay I'm going to go back into the other position now and I'm going to take a chisel maybe if I you might be able to see it me better if I work out at this direction I'm going to grab a wide chisel now and if you have one that's relatively long you can also tell whether you're cutting perpendicular or not so what I'm going to do now is put this chisel right in the scribe lines that I did with marking gauge and I want to go ahead and make a cut straight down on the sides this will square it off nicely now we've got to be careful not that we don't certainly don't want that you know that mortise to be going in on this direction or on that direction we want a person perfectly perpendicular you know to the surface clean that out you want to make sure you close your eyes when you blow the material out of there now one couple of last checks that I did make here is that when I put this square up against the edge if I can see a little bit of a space there that indicates to me that this wall is really you know on an angle in this direction and it would hold this the square away so I would have to come back and clean that corner out and I want to do it on this end as well and I don't know if you can quite see that but we got a little here let me turn this so you can actually see it you notice that I have this space right here so that means that you know this is the end of this is touching down low and I need to get inside there and clean that out so go ahead down inside here all right one more check okay what time sometimes you can just use hand pressure at this point and then I got to make sure I work right over into the corners as well since the chisel is just slightly smaller than the opening now leaves a couple of cuts on either side so that's what I need to do as far as the mortise is concerned now there's one other check that I do here so if I take a you know a six inch ruler and I put this down inside of the the mortise here what this is going to show you is that whether the sides of the mortise are perfectly square or not so if I hold this up against the side of the the the mortise and I and I cited along this way I can see that it's actually tilted over ever so slightly so that means that that wall is on a slight angle so I'm going to come back and take a little bit more from the just the bottom inside here clean out that material and go ahead and check that again that looks pretty good well check the other side and I'm thinking that that's a little bit angled as well [Music] okay so Morris is done now we're going to go ahead and go ahead and fit the the tenon to the mortise and what we have to do is we have to cut away the waste on either side and we'll do that with a rip back saw I have two saws here I have a rip saw that I can cut down along the side of the cheeks with and then I have a cross cut back so that I can cut the shoulders width so we'll start off with the the shoulder cuts and what I'm going to do is hold this in the vise here and I'm going to have it up high enough that I can still see my scribe lines I'm going to take my crosscut saw stay a sixteenth of an inch away from the line and just go ahead and cut down until I just touch the scribe line on both sides I'll flip that over and do it again and that gives us our hour to kill the cuts that you see here now I'm going to hold this up right on the vise and what you're going to notice is that I'm not holding the the piece in the vise this way because if I you know if I tighten this up in the vise and I have a shot to make my cut if it isn't holding it's snug enough the piece is going to move in this direction so if I hold it in the vise with the edges facing towards me and towards the you know that they face the the jaws of the Vice I can come down this way and that's going to hold it good and solid now when I when I instruct people how to do this sometimes where I suggest is that if you can make a soft cut from this quarter down to this corner and then the same on the opposite side Scouten same on the opposite side I can then spin it around and then come in from the opposite direction now again I'm going to stay slightly away from the line so I can eventually work to the line with a chisel or a shoulder plane so I'm going to leave myself about 1/32 here and I'm going to cut try to cut nice and straight up and down and I'll cut the opposite side as well that a little fat on that side but we have to clean it up anyway we'll spin that around come in from the opposite direction now since I made two angle cuts what's going to happen is I made a cut from this corner to that corner and then you made a cut from this corner to that corner so basically I have this little triangle that I have to come back and cut down to the shoulder and when I do that the parts should just fall off [Music] then we'll do the other side okay so that's created the rough tenon for us and notice that now if you look really closely at this mortise and tenon and the lines that we have on here you'll notice that I've left described lines all around on on the edges on the ends and on the opposite edge now those are really important lines to have because those are lines that I need to work - because if I chop - the lines on the mortise and if I can work - these lines on the tenon the piece should fit perfectly from dis absolutely perfectly so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go onto the bench and I'm going to show you I'm going to show you two ways that I usually take care of a shoulder and what I mean by taking care of a shoulder is I have this scribe line here right now and I have to cut to that line because that's the line that's going to actually make the distance between two parts for instance if I when I have a chair leg and I need to have the legs a certain distance apart you know that's what really makes the dimension and am after so again I'm going to hold this down to the bench and I always want to make sure that the part is over the bench and not hanging over the bench because if I chopped you hard here I could actually you know break off the tenon so I want to make sure that that is on top of the bench and I'll hold this in place and again I'm going to stand to the side since I have the scribe line here if I put my chisel in the line in this direction and I can be looking at it from this spot here I want to make sure that that's perfectly perpendicular I can just come down like so and the other thing is is you know it's really important that we had this scribe line because I can put that chisel right in that scribe line and it won't it won't move at all and you know that's what's really making I want to make this that's what's really going to make this joint fit and we'll get rid of a little bit of that material there okay so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go from the position on the bench over to the the vise here and I'm going to hold the piece perpendicular in the vise and I'm going to take my paring chisel this has about a 15 degree angle on it so it's a lot steeper and it creates a much sharper edge but when I go to cut to the shoulder what I'm able to do is to take and put the chisel right against the material in SOA I drag it up it just drops into that line and I'm able to just make a cut in in this direction and then once I have that established and I just come along and only take about an eighth of an inch cut from the side with each cut we work right along here and cut that off and then trim that up a little bit so that'll give us a nice shoulder now the thing that we really have to be conscious of is to make sure that that shoulder is at right angles or square in this direction if it's not if it's not square and it's angling up in this direction I'm going to when I go to actually assemble the piece into the mortise there'll be a space along the very edge so it's really important to make that cut perfectly square all right now I'm going to go ahead and try and I'll show you two ways that I generally will clean up these these cheeks I can do it one with a wide chisel where I take and put the chisel right in this the scribe line here and make sure the edges above the shoulder and I just sort of rock my way through till I get about halfway and I turn it around and come in from the other direction get that chisel right in the scribe line and I can see the the scribe line on the end of the board so that's what I'm really concentrating on and then I need to make a cut across this way to make those parts fall away and then come back and true it up a little bit okay I'm going to use what we call the shoulder plane now if I hold the piece in the vise and so that it's above the bench top the shoulder plane has to be adjusted extremely accurately if I happen to set it up and the edge of the blade is sticking out slightly more on one side than it is the other it's going to put an angle into the mortar or into the tenon and if I have if it's angled towards the shoulder it's going to make sort of a dovetail shape if it's angled towards the out end the outer end of the tenon it's going to make a tapering shape so when I set this up I look at the the the projection of the blade to make sure that it's sticking out evenly all the way across so that when I make my cuts going across this way I want to make sure that I'm not putting any angle into it a little bit more blade this is a little bit more controlled and you notice that I'm very deliberate that I come up and make the you know engage the cut and then follow through and as I progress what I do now is I look at the I look at the the line the line is good and parallel and I want to look at it on the end it's a little thinner here than it is at this end so that indicates to me that that tenon is slightly angled in this direction so it's thicker here than it is here so I'm going to concentrate my efforts now right in this area so just make partial cuts going across now if you look closely here when I get close to my line you'll notice that this is starting to flake away you can actually see you know where the scribe line was made here and I've taken it away at this end and it's still a little thick here so that indicates to me that it's actually flaring out a bit so I'm going to focus my work right on the very end here with a couple of thin cuts now this is a really a good trick when we go to fit this into the mortise it's going to fit into the mortise this way because this is my this was my reference edge which has this little swirl on it but if I take the part and I spin it around like so and hold that up against my mortise I can actually tell if you look here you can actually see I can still tell that there's just a little bit just a little bit of the mortise sticking out so what that indicates to me is that the distance from this outside surface to the cheek is not quite deep enough so if I go back to my vise and take a little bit more material from this end over here I should be in pretty good shape and again I'm going to spin this around it's lining up with the mortise now you notice when I rub my finger there I can see it as nice and parallel so I want to try and fit it now until it goes into the opening this way and that actually fits pretty good all right so the last thing that we have to do is to cut a shoulder into this that allows for what we left on the top of the leg so I'm going to take a pencil and I'm going to hold this up against the mortise I'm going to put a little line here and then I'm going to take my square and if I put that against the shoulder line I should be coming off of there perpendicular and that'll be the cut that I need to make so I'm going to make my rip cut first I mean you know vertical and I'm going to go right along that line and then I'll go ahead and make my crosscut and I'm going to leave 1/16 of an inch away from the scribe line now you'll notice that I have this little projection where I didn't cut quite up to the line so I need to put this up right in my vise again and then take my paring chisel put it right in the scribe line and scribe across this way here making sure that's perfectly parallel now I want to make sure that the corners of the tenon to cleaned really well and then I'm also going to take my shoulder plane and I'm going to bevel the top of the tenon and what that does is it when I go to assemble this it elects the bevel will make it funnel into the the opening and clean up the end a little bit I should just hopefully just fit in there nicely now all right so you'll notice that it isn't quite seating so there must be something inside of the mortise which I think is probably the case oh yeah I can see it down inside there so I'm going to go ahead try to get down inside there with my mortise chisel oh yeah big old piece down in the corner that I missed there we go look back that's beautiful okay so what we want to do now is uh you know this is how all these mortise and Tenon's would have been put together now if you have a little bit of a you know a problem I think I got a little bit of a shoulder that's not quite seated correctly so I'm going to just rescrub the shoulder ever so slightly and recut it and that will allow me to have a good flat surface because I notice that there's a little a little difference in the height of these shoulders so just to rescrub this ever so slightly if I do if you're making a table or something like this you would have to do it to the opposite parts as well a lot of times when I chop on when I'm on the bench I find that some of the edges crush a little bit so this isn't much I prefer actually paring the shoulder with a chisel like this and come back this way now what this is they call that industrial art all right then we'll flip this around and we'll create a little more industrial art here come in from the other direction from the end make sure that's cleaned well Fitz that's much better I'm happier with that all right so what the other thing I'd like to show you before we finish up here is in the old days they didn't have any kind of clamps or anything in order to hold these things together so what they did was a process by which they called raw boring and what that means is I drill a hole through the mortise and then I assemble the tenon into the mortise and I mark where the the hole is and then offset of it ever so slightly so that when I drive a wooden nail or a pin in there it'll actually pull it snuggly and hold it together so let me get out a couple of tools here so that I can go ahead and drill that hole first of all I'm going to find the center mark and I'm going to come in I want to be in about a quarter of an inch off the shoulder so I'm going to go ahead and make a mark here about a quarter of an inch in and I want the edge of the hole to be at that quarter inch mark so I'm going to revert to a cordless drill here just to make things simpler okay so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go ahead and drill that hole so that the the hole is right alongside of the the quarter inch mark that I made so I have a drill set up here and what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and drill all the way through here and sometimes what I like to do is I like to at least put a piece of wood in in the back here so it doesn't split out too much when I'm drilling through this so go ahead and get the drill using a nice little Brad point drill here and I'm going to drill it all the way through to the other side [Applause] okay now you can you can see there's a hole that goes all the way through that now I'm going to go ahead and assemble my my mortise and tenon and I'm going to use this Brad point bit and I'm going to go ahead and mark where the center of that is now when I when I mark that Center which you can see here you can see that that's the center right there now if you think about this if I drilled the hole right in the same place you know it'll just basically go through but if I offset the hole slightly like this what happens is I have the wall of the hole that's going through the tenon is slightly closer to the shoulder so that when I drive the pin in it'll push against the side of that hole and draw the whole thing together we hope let's give it a try so I'm going to offset this hole now ever so slightly by about a sixteenth of an inch or so and now let's see if we can see what's going on in here now I don't know if you can see inside of here or not but you can actually should be able to see that part of the hole on the tenon is slightly closer to the shoulder now we have to go ahead and make a pin so you want to choose a nice hard piece of hardwood of some sort I have a piece of ash on the bench over here and I need to make a quarter inch pin so I'm going to go ahead and set my marking gauge to a quarter of an inch and I'm going to make a couple of lines I'm going to try to choose a nice straight grain area so this is pretty has some nice straight grain on it so I'm going to go ahead and make a line in this direction and then again another one in this direction and I'll go ahead and cut those I'm going to need a little bit bigger saw to do that so let me grab that I'm going to put the lines on the top though so I can see what I'm doing let me grab a little bit wider saw so what I have here is a attendance are and attendance saw tends to be a little bit wider than a dovetail saw I was able to cut the tenon with the dovetail saw because that was only going in inches so I'm going to need to have a little bit more material for this this pin so I'm going to use something a little bit wider I'm going to go ahead and cut down along the side here at a quarter of an inch and I'm going to go ahead and spin this and cut this from the opposite direction now then we'll cut this this off of here with a crosscut saw and that's going to give me my quarter inch pin now you'll notice that the pin I haven't quite gotten to the line there so I need to put this in the vise and plane to the quarter inch mark so I'll go ahead and try to grab that like so grab my plane get down to my line pretty close a little bit more on this end well if you having trouble holding another way to do this is to flip the plane upside down then push the piece across okay and we'll get rid of the saw-max on this side now I'm going to go ahead and leave this square because it I'm going to put a square pin into a round hole now one of the things that we'll have to be conscious of is we're going to we need to taper the end of the pin and we want to taper it in a way that it favors one side of the pit of the the pin itself so I'm going to go ahead and sort of turn this into an octagon whittle it down and then I'm going to heavily whittle it on one side so that I can get the pin beyond that offset hold that's in the tenon that's why we make the pin extra long as well now you can notice that this is favoring one side so it's heavy on the tapers heavy on one side so that when I put this into the the opening here it's going to miss the the missed via the offset of the hole now when we go to drive this in we want to use a hammer go heavy hammer and you want to make sure I got a taper that a little bit more one of the problems that you can have is if you drive this pin in it can hit the other side of the hole and it would hit the end of the pin and stop it from you know going all the way through and if that happens sometimes the pin will break off inside of the hole and you have to drill it out and it just as makes it a little bit more difficult so that's looking pretty good now now when I go to drive this pin home I want to put it over a hole on the bench make sure it's sitting good and flat and then we just drive that right and I mean you can't get anything much stronger than that it's unbelievable and usually on some of the older pieces of furniture that you find they leave the pins sticking out like this they don't use any glue you can knock that out take the piece of furniture apart so and then another little decorative element that they might put on to the top would be a little a little pyramid here and that would accent the pin and if you burnish it a little bit with another piece of wood make it look like it's 200 years old so that's what we have now if we needed to we can certainly plane off the top of you know the rail to meet the top of the leg just by passing a plane across here and there we have it one mortise-and-tenon thanks for being with me I'm Phil lo at the Furniture Institute in Massachusetts and this is the art of woodworking [Music] Oh [Music]

Channel: Beverly Community Access Media

Views: 124,848

Rating: 4.9063778 out of 5

Keywords: BevCam, The Art of Woodworking, The Furniture Institure of Massachusetts, Beverly MA

Id: KtwbN3hvroE

Length: 60min 49sec (3649 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 12 2017