Every now and then, I’ve been making a mortise and tenon joint for practice. I usually manage to screw up in some subtle way, but have generally not made the same mistake twice. Then last night, I made one that seems actually halfway passable.

The chip on the bottom of the mortise piece was there before. These pieces of wood have been sitting around for months, so where I used a block plane to even up the edges, you can see how much the wood has darkened in that time. I glued it up just to see how well it would work. Not bad.

Interestingly, I made this joint faster than any I’ve made in the past. So practice does help. I’ve gotta stop sawing so close to the knife line on the shoulder, though. It makes it hard to chisel down from the line.

Now that I had taken care of the front vise in place and a working small tenon saw, I decided to make another go at a mortise and tenon.

Although this turned out to be a very workable joint, I made three incredibly stupid mistakes:

1. I didn’t measure the mortise properly. This mortise was supposed to start 1/2″ from the end, not 3/4″. Though I just trimmed the tenon on one side to compensate… doh!
2. I didn’t cut the tenon on the end of the board that I had marked.
3. I accidentally cut the cheeks of the tenon with a crosscut saw instead of a ripsaw. This affected speed, accuracy, and finish. Let’s try to avoid doing that again.

In spite of this, there is quite a lot of good news:

- Other than the length, the mortise turned out perfectly, with a clean bottom and straight sides.
- My newly-sharpened tenon saw worked astonishing well for cutting the shoulders.
- Hooray for the front vise.
- I did this one in half the time as my first one.
- The fit is good.
- It was really fun to make.

I’m going to practice another one of these soon, but I believe that the next thing I need to do is make a mallet. Banging on chisels with a block of birch is bogus.

So I made the tenon for the mortise tonight. It seemed pretty straightforward, and I did arrive at something that looks like a tenon:

Well, it certainly looks like a tenon, and it does fit the mortise:

Unfortunately, it does not fit the mortise perfectly. The joint is perfectly square, and it fits snugly, and that’s all great, except that it’s a little misaligned on the horizontal plane. Well, that is, it’s misaligned in the configuration that I wanted. It’s aligned if I flip the tenon around (sigh). This seems to have something to do with the lines scribed by the marking gauge. They were probably too thick. Oh well, that’s an easy problem to fix.

Other than that, I had some performance-related difficulties. First, the dovetail saw that I used wasn’t sharpened worth crap. Its teeth are too small for any of my files. I don’t need teeth that fine, but I don’t have any other appropriate saws. Maybe I should just bite the bullet and cut entirely new teeth on that stupid thing.

The other problem was that the angle of approach was difficult when I was cutting the cheeks. That means that I seriously need to install my front vise.

On the positive side, I didn’t spend nearly as much time fooling around with my chisels this time. So it seems that I’m getting the hang of sharpening those guys.

Next, I suppose that I will do another mortise and tenon. But maybe I’ll try to throw on the vise before I try the tenon.

I decided to start the mortise of my very first mortise and tenon joint today. I don’t have a mortise chisel, so I used the old “drill holes and chop out the waste” method with my Millers Falls #5.

It’s 13/16″ deep and a little more than 1/4″ wide.

Surprisingly, this didn’t take much time at all. I think I spent a much more significant amount of time fiddling around with sharpening my chisels than doing the actual cutting, but that was only because I was being a bonehead with my 1/4″ chisel.

Even more surprisingly, it looks halfway decent. The sides seem reasonably flat and perpendicular. I guess you only get to see how badly you messed up when you cut the tenon, which is what I have to do next.