Master Mortise & Tenon Joinery with a Band Saw

Mortise and Tenon Joinery is a great way to put together chairs and tables and the band saw is one way that we can pull off the tenon that we need to make on the rails. So here I'm going to show you how you can use a simple setup on the band saw in order to execute perfectly fitting tenons for your furniture joinery. In order to do our tenons, we have to do a couple of things to get ready here on the band saw. One is, you want your mortises already cut is a general rule in woodworking this isn't news. You're going to make the negative first, and then create a positive that fits into that negative.

So we want the mortise done, we're going to put the tenons on these rails such that it fits inside there. With the rail material, I have one to go and one to show here. I need the real rail that I'm going to cut my tenons into. I need a piece of test material, that is exactly the same thickness as my real piece. I'm going to do my test cuts on this, that's what I'm going to use in order to position the fence.

We're going to feed our material like this on the band saw. So you have to have a fence that you can ride against and the easier it is to control that fence left and right, 'cause you're going to have to fine tune it, to dial it in, the easier it's going to make this process for it. So mortises, test pieces, that are exactly the same thickness as the real deal and a fence on the band saw that'll get you set up so we are about ready for the first step. Before I worry about positioning the fence perfectly for the tenon, I wanna position it to make a shoulder for the tenon. So what I'm going to do, and this is just for my test piece, this isn't real critical where I position this, I'm going to set it the length of the tenon from the band saw blade.

So I'm looking for a three-quarter inch tenon here. And again, don't go nuts over this, you're going to see that for test cut purposes this doesn't have to be perfect it only has to be close. Then using a miter gauge, I'll hold my material against the fence and nibble into this face. So what I'm doing on this test piece is just creating a shoulder here, so that when I cut this way, that piece falls away and I can see if my tenon will fit or not. So I need to enter here about a quarter of an inch.

And I'm going to do that on both ends, so that I have ample opportunity to do some tests cuts here. That step gives me these what I really need, just temporary shoulder cuts. I just want them there so that now when I do my test cuts coming this way that piece falls away. So next step we'll be able to start to position the fence in order to actually produce a tenon inside here. In order to start on the tenon, let's have a look first at the mortise.

I've made a quarter inch mortise in this piece, so I want to make a tenon that's going to match. So my first step is I'm going to take off these pencil marks that I put on there for that first cut. Now I'm going to use my pencil like a marking gauge along with my finger, and I'm going to make some lines on here indicating where I think my tenon is going to be cut. Now, if you're not comfortable doing this with your finger and a pencil, like I am, you could do this with a marking gauge, a regular marking gauge setting the fence, striking this line because what we want to do is now take that and compare it to the mortise that we've already got done. So I'm going to take my two lines, and just hold them over the mortise.

Now, when I look at this, my two lines are just a little bit too close together that would result in a 10 and that's just a little bit too small. That's okay. Because what that tells me is when I set my fence I want to be outside those pencil lines. If I cut right on them, the tenon is going to be too tiny. So I'm going to set my fence so that I leave the pencil line.

I would rather start with the tenon too big, 'cause I can keep moving the fence over and taking the wood off, if I start with the tenon and too small, then I've got to go to the other end of my test cut right away. So here I've positioned the fence so that the blade is to the left of this line. The wood I'm cutting off is up against the fence. That's going to let me make a cut in the cut. See what we have.

Now we can check the work here. What I want is for that tenon to slip right into that mortise. In this case, I could probably drive it in there but I can't push it in there it's too tight. So we need to make the tenon just a little bit smaller than it is right now. So what that means with this setup is that I need to move the fence a little bit to the left.

Now, remember that it just takes tiny, tiny adjustments here and that's when I was saying earlier you need a fence that you can move in small increments. Because I'm going to cut and cut. So if I move it a 32nd, I'm actually going to make my 10 and smaller by as full 16's So I need just a small change here. I'm watching the fence to watch the movement of it. Then we'll clip it again, do another test.

That's much better, it goes in there. It's still, I'm going to say just a little bit too tight, so one more small change on the fence and I think we'll have it. Now we have a good fit between those parts, and we can go ahead and get set up in order to cut the real tenons on our real rails. Now the fence is all set, it's fine tuned so that our tenon is the right size. So we're going to take our real material and cut it and cut it.

We got to know when to stop. Otherwise, we're just going to make a cut a tenon a cut, that's way too long. So now we need a stop block. I'm going to put a block on the fence, like this, that is just a little bit less than the length of the tenon behind the teeth. So if I want a three quarter inch tenon, I would set this block so that from the teeth, it's about 11 sixteens to the tip of the tooth and clamp that in place.

Now, the reason for that is that we're going to actually completely finish the tenon using the table saw. The table saw is a great way to cut the shoulders on the tenon and it's going to do a little bit crisper job than the band saw is going to do on the shoulders. So we want to leave a little bit of wood to work with there that's where we want this set up to be just a little bit short of the full 10 in length. Now, a good thing to point out here, notice that the stop block is up off the table. The reason for that is look at all the sawdust we've created already.

If that block was tight down to the table there'd be a chance that as my material pushes up against it, I ended up up against this little bubble of sawdust which is pushing against the end of the board and I don't quite get to the end of my cut, that's going to make our tenons way shorter than what we want. So it's a good rule to always hold your stock block up like that. Then the dust can fall away underneath it. We're all set to go here we've got the stop block, we have the fence position, we're ready to make our cuts here on the rails by just entering the blade kissing right up against the face of that block. There are band saw cuts are done, and if we look at this, this is all waste wood around the outside with our tenon in the middle.

Now notice, that obviously I made four cuts commonly on a tenon we also create a shoulder at the top and at the bottom. And in the case of the project I'm working on here, it's about a quarter inch shoulder per side, all the way around. So with the same fence position I can make this cut and this cut depending on the project and the tenon joinery that you're doing, it's possible, you'll have to change the fence position to do the top and the bottom shoulders. So this part, the band saw work is all done. We know we've got this perfectly fitting tenon inside.

Here's what you do at the table saw; you'll set your table saw fence, so that the material can go against the fence and that blade will cut 10 into the correct length. The height of your table saw blade should be so that it just comes up into this space right here. And obviously doesn't cut into the tenon at all. So that table saw step will wrap you up and you'll have perfectly fitting tenon that you produced here on the band saw.