
Making Rustic Furniture: Mortise and Tenons
George VondriskaDescription
I'm working on a spindle for a chair. So, what's going to happen when this is all done, I've got to have a tenon on each end that perfectly mates into a hole I drill in the chair itself. Wanna make sure I have a good fit, chairs take a lot of abuse. So, I need to make sure that when I turn the tenon on the end of this, it's going to perfectly match the hole I drill in the leg of the chair. One way I could do that would be using my parting tool and my calipers, I can set the calipers to that diameter, carefully test as I go.
I'm going to demand a little bit more accuracy on this. I want to make sure I have a great fit. So, the way I'm going to do it is using this block of wood. What I've done here is took a full-sized block drilled into it a one inch hole. Then, I cut the block in half.
So now I've got kind of a go/no-go gauge for my tenon that I'm working on here. I've labeled it as one inch, so when I use it for other projects, I already know what size it is. The way I'll use it here is make cuts, test the fit, make cuts, test the fit until I get this diameter on my spindle down to a point where this perfectly straddles that material. Here's how it works. That's a perfect fit, I know that that end is going to go right into the one inch hole I'm gonna drill in the leg, it's going to be very, very strong 'cause I'm going to have a great mate between the tenon and the hole.
Remember, as you're dialing into that final, final size that when you cut, you're taking off twice the amount of wood you might think you are. In other words, if I'm peeling off a 32nd from this side I'm affecting the overall diameter by a 1/16 of an inch. So very, very light passes at the end to sneak up on that final setting. But this is a very easy way to make sure it's dead accurate.
not long enough
Would you ever cut a V=notch in the end and add a thin wedge, that extends past the end (perhaps 1/8" at most) as a means of locking the tenon into the mortise? Or, would you only use the tension and some glue?