Hello again chappies and chappesses. After a small delay, I have been back out in the “workshop” playing havoc to some “ex trees” (this tree’s not dead, he’s merely having a rest”).
This morning’s task was to drill some holes on the mortice wotsits for when I peg the thing together. The first thing I did was make a cuppa and sit down to think about it, this is the hardest bit of the job. Any chippies here will know that you usually get shouted at when doing this hardest part of the job.
The mortices are “blind/stopped?”, well they don’t come out the other side of the wood (that’s the theory at least!). And When pegging joints I think there’s the chance that when “tightened up”, you can pull the end grain out of the tenon, or tear the grain sideways out of either side of the hol…mortice. I decided that I’d put the hole through halfway down the tenon, which means it’ll be nearer the “join” side of the timber that the mortice is in. I believe in large oak buildings, that the peg-holes can be a lot closer to the join, though someone who knows what they’re doing can chip in to clarify that. Here’s me measuring the length of the tenon;
You can see I’m using proper measurements here, very easy to “halve” for the position of the hole, (some Frenchman’s scribbled some nonsense on the other side of this rule!). Then I’m marking the “halved” distance on the side of the mortice piece;
To get the position of the hole right, I’ve marked the end of a tenon at its midpoint to use as a template;
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Once I’d marked all the “right angle” mortice and tenons, It was time to make some chips ‘n’ dust. The joints for the angle braces are going to need at least one more cup of tea to think about. I was going to try out the spare chuck on the morticer to see how well it works out as a bench drill. This is the spare chuck and what they call a taper drift (I still call something else a taper-drift so I’ll call this the bit-of-metal-stick-wot-the-chuck-goes-on );
This is “tapped together” with a stick, remembering to retract the jaws on the chuck so as not to damage them, then I stuck it up into the chuck wot is inside the morticer;
This is where I realised you need to take the holdy-down-the-wood-footy-thing off the fence, otherwise the chuck would hit it. Then I realised my drill was a bit long and I had little clearance for the wood to fit under it!
So I had to turf Mr Makita out of his “caravan” and rummaged around to see if I had a shorter one hanging around in there. Now for a couple of piccies to add to my review of the morticer:
Handy thingy for holding on to the chuck key (wish they had one for the Allen Key!);
Any foundry-men/women will like to see the quality of the castings;
I do believe that’s been gravel-cast, not sand-cast! This is the clearance I got with 2” timber, and a bit of batten, with an 8mm drill stuffed as far up Jacob’s chuck as I could get it!
A bit tight, but hey ho! I put a bit of batten under the timber to save the “foot-plate” of the machine (that’s what they called it) and wedged a spare bit of wood into the mortice, that I had cut off the side of a tenon (ooh what a cheek sir!), hopefully this would prevent the drill tearing out the wood on its way through;
Now all I needed to do was connect up the smoke to the motor, BBRRR GRRR WHIZZ and Hey Presto (I think Safeway became Morrisons after that) holes in wood;
The next bit was doing the holes for the brace mortices. I’m telling you, this took at least three cuppas to work out! As the tenons on the mortices were at all sorts of angles, I knew the hole shouldn’t be halfway along the side of the mortices, but nearer one end, otherwise it would be somewhere stupid in the tenon. So I thought it better to put it on the mid-line of the tenon;
Once I’d seen it there I put this on the top of the timber with the mortice in it;
….and this helped me how to work out how to mark it out. I squared up from the mid-line of the mortice;
And then used the 45degree wotsit on the “American Carpenters Square”, to mark along in the direction that the brace would come in at. Here you can see where the hole’s to be drilled, much closer to one end of the mortice than you might think. (the edges of the mortice are marked “square” across the timbers here);
PS. If you’re thinking of using a “clicky” modern propelling pencil for marking wood, like I’m doing, don’t. Get a proper pencil instead!
WHIZZ BRRR OUCH! Job done;
I’m just gonna have some lunch and then work out how to do the holes in the tenons, this’ll be a three cuppa job at the very least!
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