Wedged Mortise and Tenon - Joint of the Week

[Music] on this week's join of the week we're gonna do one of the most popular joints in woodworking the wedged mortise and tenon this is a gorgeous joint used in furnitures attaching legs to stretchers it's used in work benches all over the place and it may look easy but to be honest this is my second time doing it I'm gonna show you that quickly because it is terrible so this is this is just a good reminder for me personally to you know remember that good woodworking takes good practice and that's what joining the week is all about so let's fix our mistakes and lay out a mortise so I'm gonna assume you have square milled stock we're starting from that point I'm gonna be attaching a piece of walnut to a piece of walnut with some maple wedges I'm gonna put the maple aside for now now when laying out a mortise you need to consider a few things one for me what I like to think about is what is going to make my life easier usually when you have to do mortise and tenon you've got quite a few of them to do and so what I like to do is do them about the size of my router bit we're gonna be using a half inch router bit that actually really cool router bit I'll show you in a minute and this piece is one inch and so what I'm gonna do is find the center of this board and lay it out at half an inch ensuring that one my router bit will cut it in one pass not depth obviously but one lengthwise pass and that way I'm taking off a very easily calculable amount from this piece which is a quarter inch from each side so to lay these out what I like to do obviously first is find the middle you could do that a lot of ways exactly three inches so our middle is inch and a half whenever I'm laying out mortises I start with a pencil and then when I know that it's where I want it to be I'll move to a marking knife and that marking knife line is going to help you later when you're chiseling and also help you with your round [Applause] [Music] I'm gonna be using this really cool ultimate router jig that I built it does all sorts of things I'll link the video right here in the corner really cool but all you really need is an edge guide for this you just would need to place this and find the center I'm also gonna be using this really cool half-inch bit from a company called bit Smith's there's a discount code down below great company and they put this really cool coating on router bits so they last forever they're awesome stuff but the reason I like to use I like to use an up cut bit one because you need to clear chips on a mortise otherwise everything's gonna get real hot in there and you could ruin the life of your bid or burn your wood but also a spiral bit as opposed to a straight vent is a lot better at cleaner cuts and removing material so we're gonna go ahead and set this up and then we'll head over the table some cut our tents [Music] our mortise is done one thing I didn't mention is when you're cutting it you should label your inside and outside and make sure you get a really nice crisp line on the outside and then you're gonna fit your tenon backwards you're gonna test it from the outside because that's obviously where you want it to look the best and then the inside you know I have a little bit of blowout here not a big deal because you're gonna have a lip all the way around your tenon that hides any imperfections so for laying out our tenon because this is a three mortise and tenon with wedges I'm going to try and make it proud doesn't always happen in my flush trim it but it would be cool if we can keep about a quarter inch on it so what I'm gonna do is set my distance with my stop block and I'm just gonna take my stop block and slide my piece in between here just like that and then I'm going to take it out a quarter-inch so I'm going to just slide the micro adjust over here a quarter inch and that's gonna make me proud it's so now that I have my tenon shoulder laid out probably the best practice to lay that out with a marking knife on your piece now for actually cutting your tenon it's the reason we leave a little bit extra is we can use that as a test make sure you're using a flat bottom blade or a dado stack because I don't have a lot of material to roof here I'm just gonna use my regular blade but if you had a big tenon it'd be easier to use a dado stack I know you Europeans don't have those so I'm gonna measure from the outside of the board you basically want to take the height of your mortise and subtract it from the height of your board and then divide that by two and that's going to be the height of your blade so we're going to go ahead and do some test passes and then do some final passes we want it to be pretty darn snug because whether you use a data stock or a regular ten inch blade you're gonna have some marks on there that you're gonna want to clean up with some hand planes so you're gonna take off another very very very teeny amount so it's really stuck now when you clean up the tenon it's it's gonna fit perfectly [Music] [Music] so now we need to drill our relief holes which will keep this from splitting all the way down and our curves you can easily cut this with a handsaw but I find that the size of the wedge that comes with a handsaw curve is just super thin and if anything sort of binds up you're gonna snap them off and end up you know having one a very thin line for your wedge in which I think it doesn't look as cool as maybe a little bit thicker one and also you risk breaking it off so I'm actually going to cut this kerf with my table saw and then we're gonna drill holes here and easy way to place holes equally when you're doing an odd number is divided by one more than you're trying to do so I need two holes so I'm going to take this length one and a quarter and divide it by three which is point four one and two thirds roughly which is roughly thirteen thirty seconds don't worry I'm not that fast at math I looked this up before we started recording okay so now that we have our curves cut it is time to cut our wedges and here's a great little trick I learned about how to cut consistent slow tapering wedges you really want these wedges to be super consistent otherwise you're gonna have something that looks geometrically just sort of off so what I do is I take something that's about a little right around double the thickness of the wedge that I want so we're shooting for an eighth inch length that's what's going to spread that out and you're going to take that piece that's about double the thickness of the wedge that you want and double-stick tape that to the edge of your board and you want it to sit above the surface your board because you don't want it to get out of square this way so that's gonna ride along your fence then you're gonna take your saw to and start it right at the edge of your board and you want to make sure it's right at the edge because you're going to need to reference the edge later again so this is gonna help you be consistent so you can see that's just right that tooth is exactly even with that edge now I'm gonna run it through and when I'm done I'm gonna flip it around so that the part that I cut the wedge from is flat against the fence and then I'm gonna align the edge of the board again with that final tooth I'll bump my fence over and that's gonna give me two perfectly consistent wedges so let me show you how I do it [Music] now we're just about ready to glue this up first we need to clean up our tenon just get rid of these saw marks now that we have our wedges cut and sized that's one thing I forgot to mention over at the table saw it's probably easier to do that wedge thing if you cut it to the right width of your tenon first so I just go in sideways and you want to do them at the same time so I just go until you get like a friction fit and then you want to tap them at the same time because again you really want that even line in the middle so you got to remember glue is gonna get in there and start make things start to swell so you want to mark them about right where they bottomed out here and then once you figure that out then you can just cut them you know about halfway down your tenon because there's no way once glue gets in there you're gonna get these things all the way down glue just sort of binds everything up no matter what you do so I'm gonna go ahead and mark these making sure that my wedges are even up here for measuring the length of our wedge you're gonna go roughly and this is rough because you're gonna hit these in with a hammer but maybe like two-thirds of the way down just gonna mark mine right above the hole and trust me this seems like oh it's just a wedge but this makes all the difference in the world of the look so I'm going to go ahead and cut them off here this is again the bottom and then I'm not going to cut right at my height line I'm going to cut above that one because it's going to give us a thicker thing to hit with a hammer to it is going to make them less likely to break when you're putting in because you get a little bit more material and you're gonna flush trim it off later so I'm gonna cut above not too far above because you want to make sure that they go in equally and the bigger they are the easier it is to mess that up so now we have our wedges make sure you label them which way is up because otherwise you're gonna forget and put one in backwards and mess up your whole viewing [Music] [Music] [Music] Wow guys that came out really cool I love the way that looks and it is so imperative when you do that that you take your time with the wedges because you really want them to be equal and the same width and all that stuff so use those tricks I showed you for getting equal sized wedges and just take your time when you're cutting the outside face your mortise because that's obviously what's going to show so let me know what you'd like to see on the next join of the week I'd love doing this series and I love learning again this was my second try had a big fail the first time and I'm so happy we nailed it this time so get out in the shop get some practice done stay safe and have a wonderful day [Music]

Channel: Jonathan Katz-Moses

Views: 99,203

Keywords: woodworking, mortise and tenon, mortice and tenon, through mortise and tenon, wedged mortise and tenon, wedged tenon, through wedged mortise and tenon, mortise, keyed mortise and tenon, large mortise and tenon, mortise and tenon by hand, wedged through tenon, through mortice and tenon, tenon, wedged mortise and tenons, blind wedged mortise and tenon, wedged through mortise and tenon, how to cut wedged mortise and tenon

Id: y-h790VzNAQ

Length: 11min 50sec (710 seconds)

Published: Sun May 19 2019