What tool to get

[Chris_belgium]

Hello, I'm a recent new home owner, and with the current housv prices here in Belgium this means I will be a poor man for the next 20 years until I have finally payed of my mortgage.

Anyway, I'll be needing a lot of new stuff for my house, front door, 2 rear doors, 6m driveway gate, 4m garage door, and a lot of other stuff.

All of these things are constructed with mortice & tenon joints, I have made a small gate using my handheld router and MDF jigs, https://www.ukworkshop.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=13994&highlight=

But this method was very time consuming, and time is something I have very little off (since I am always working to pay my mortgage ), so I'm looking to invest in a woodrat or something similar, what would be the best 'machine' for my intended purpose?

The driveway gate will be the same design as the garden gate but instead of 1m long it will be approx. 5m long so it will have about 40 to 50 m&t joints in it. The garage door will be an accordion design (litteraly translated from dutch don't konw if it's the proper English word), basically it will be four 1m wide doors when opened they fold up like an accordion. Again there will be at least 30+ m&t joints. So I am looking for a tool to speed fabricating up a bit.

Thank you for your time, Christof.

 

[andycorleone]

I'm not an expert but I think a festool domino

http://www.axminster.co.uk/product.asp? ... e=1&jump=0

can do the trick very quick, I'm sure you can sell it 20% less after the job. A cheap solution is the Trend Mortice & Tenon Jig

http://www.axminster.co.uk/product.asp? ... e=1&jump=0

which you don't need to square the corners

 

[WellsWood]

The domino's a good tool for sure, but I'm not convinced the joints would be strong enough for full sized doors, especially external grade joinery which I would be inclined to do "properly" with wedged through M&Ts.
Festools are also damned expensive, for the price of a domino you could get a pretty good full sized morticer like any of these:
this,
this
or this
and have plenty of change to spend on timber :wink:

 

[Chris_belgium]

I have got a biscuit jointer, but what I am looking for is a quicker way for making tenon & mortices than the router-homemade jig method.

The dedicated morticer sure does look nice, but I then still have to make the tenons. I'm thinking the woodrat is the way to go for me. Offcourse I have never used one so I am not sure. Anyone who owns a woodrat and uses it for T&M want to give me some info on how quick (or slow) the woodrat setup is for tenons and mortices?

Please bear in mind that the t&m will be rather big since theyre intended use is for garage doors and such. Don't know if this makes a difference for the woodrat.

thanks.

 

[nickson71]

It depends what you want to make


in all honesty if your making doors windows etc I'd personally get a dedicated morticer and make my tenons on a router table (or table saw with jig if I had the room for a table saw )

I've got a woodrat at the moment but I'm selling it due to cash flow problems............... saying that once the other half is working again and we're a bit more stable I'm intending on replacing it

I found the the woodrat ideal for the bits of furniture I've made but for doors etc I think you'll need longer tenons and deep mortices than you can get with the rat. Mind you I've never made a front door


Hope this helps

Ian

 

[Chris Knight]

For the size of mortice you envisage, I'd use a hand-held plunge router equipped with two fences (either side of the workpiece. I have made over a hundred mortices in a day this way on outdoor furniture. Leave the ends of the mortices rounded. Tenons, I would just cut by hand with a saw. Round the tenons with a coarse file or rasp - after the first few, it goes really quickly.

 

[George_N]

External doors are traditionally made with wedged, through M&T joints. If the stiles are 100 mm wide you could rout the mortise with a 50 mm kitchen worktop-type bit by working from both sides. Drilling out most of the waste (with a drill press, if you have one or access to one) would make it easier. I'm think Mr Grimsdale might advocate doing it by hand with an oval bolstered mortise chisel, which is fine if you have the skill/strength/patience to do it that way. I would definitely use wedged M&Ts though, as the joint will still hold when the glue eventually fails.

 

[TheTiddles]

Ok, there are loads of ways of doing what you want. The woodrat is very good, far from perfect (it will be when I'm finished with it), but a very good tool. However... trying to cut a 6m long fence rail on a woodrat??!! Possible, sure, but so is sticking your foot in your mouth, given enough practice. If you cut the tennons the way woodrat suggests you will need to mount your woodrat on the outside of an upstairs window!

I might use it for the doors but for gates I would make an MDF router jig to clamp on the end of the rail and cut the mortices or tennons, it will take you a day at the most to get it working perfectly. You could do it all by hand, but if you are like me you're probably too much of a perfectionist to tollerate errors and too short of time to get that good.

Why don't you see if there is someone locally who would let you use their bit of machinery? There are plenty of people on this forum and personally if someone near me needed to use my baby mortiser or another bit of kit, I'd be fine with that.

Aidan

 

[Chris_belgium]

Ok, there are loads of ways of doing what you want. The woodrat is very good, far from perfect (it will be when I'm finished with it), but a very good tool. However... trying to cut a 6m long fence rail on a woodrat??!! Possible, sure, but so is sticking your foot in your mouth, given enough practice. If you cut the tennons the way woodrat suggests you will need to mount your woodrat on the outside of an upstairs window!

I might use it for the doors but for gates I would make an MDF router jig to clamp on the end of the rail and cut the mortices or tennons, it will take you a day at the most to get it working perfectly. You could do it all by hand, but if you are like me you're probably too much of a perfectionist to tollerate errors and too short of time to get that good.

Why don't you see if there is someone locally who would let you use their bit of machinery? There are plenty of people on this forum and personally if someone near me needed to use my baby mortiser or another bit of kit, I'd be fine with that.

Aidan

I have looked at the woodrat on the the woodrat site and watched some of the tutorials, and it looked to me that I could do some test pieces to get the mortice dead centre of the rail, then clamp the 6m long rail down to the woodrat, do maybe 3 or 4 mortices quickly then move the rail along do another 3 or 4 mortices and so on. I have a 60m² workshop so I have some room to work. Am I missing something in how the woodrat works so that this method would be imposssible?

When you say router jig do you mean something like I used when making my small gate https://www.ukworkshop.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=13994&highlight=
Or is it something more complicated. I have seen some pictures on this site for mortice jigs, but never fully understood how they work, some tips would be great!

What cost me the most time was the fact that I could only route a couple of mm depth. So to get the 6cm mortice depth that I used on the small gate I had to make about 10 passes. Is this due to the use of a wrong/cheap router bit or is this normal? If I tried to go deep on the first pass (let's say about 1cm) my router would get very unstable and deliver a very rough uneven cut. (router is a Bosch 8mm shank, with a bosh 16mm router bit)

 

[Newbie_Neil]

I would not recommend the Domino for this job. You could always use the Leigh FMT. Have a look here.

You can make multiple M&T's so size become less of an issue.

Cheers,
Neil

 

[Chris_belgium]

It depends what you want to make


in all honesty if your making doors windows etc I'd personally get a dedicated morticer and make my tenons on a router table (or table saw with jig if I had the room for a table saw )

I've got a woodrat at the moment but I'm selling it due to cash flow problems............... saying that once the other half is working again and we're a bit more stable I'm intending on replacing it

I found the the woodrat ideal for the bits of furniture I've made but for doors etc I think you'll need longer tenons and deep mortices than you can get with the rat. Mind you I've never made a front door


Hope this helps

Ian

How does the woodrat limit the depth of the cut? I can get about a 5cm deep mortice now with my router with long bit and extension collet. So it should be possible to get this depth with the woodrat (offcourse minus the thickness of the woodrat baseplate, but that can't be that thick?)

 

[Chris_belgium]

External doors are traditionally made with wedged, through M&T joints. If the stiles are 100 mm wide you could rout the mortise with a 50 mm kitchen worktop-type bit by working from both sides. Drilling out most of the waste (with a drill press, if you have one or access to one) would make it easier. I'm think Mr Grimsdale might advocate doing it by hand with an oval bolstered mortise chisel, which is fine if you have the skill/strength/patience to do it that way. I would definitely use wedged M&Ts though, as the joint will still hold when the glue eventually fails.

I'm planning on using dowelled m&t joints for the corners, the rail for my driveway gate is 8 x 14 cm, and I can't make a 14cm deep mortice. Planning on using big dowels maybe 15mm diameter so they should be plenty strong??

I have a lot of respect for people who have the skill to make m&t joints by hand, I myself do not have the patience, skill and precision to make these joints by hand. I need some kind of jig to achieve some precision

 

[Chris Knight]

Your router is a bit small for this job - a 3 HP router capable of taking a half inch bit would be better. I would still limit the depth of cut to around 5-8 mm per pass though but they go very quickly.

 

[TheTiddles]

If you want to save money do what you've already done, but perhaps rough out the mortice with an auger first, very satisfying in a brace and makes you feel like a proper craftman... then rout the mortice accurate.

A small router is a limit and you will end up taking lots of passes, even then you won't get the depth you are after, perhaps not even with a half inch router, collet extender and spiral cut bit, which will cost you at least £120 even if you go for the cheapest, nastiest, plastic formed piece of tat from B&Q. Routers can cut very well on the plunge, but tracking places load radially and that's when the bearings have to be good, with the shaft as short as it is in a router it will never be that good.

The woodrat will do lovely mortices but the tenons need to be cut with the workpiece vertical, so for a 6m post that's a woodrat 6m up in the air!

 

[Chris_belgium]

The woodrat will do lovely mortices but the tenons need to be cut with the workpiece vertical, so for a 6m post that's a woodrat 6m up in the air!

Plan is to do the tenons on the vertical posts wich are only 1,4m, I'm 1,9 m so that could just work


Looks like I'll be going the homemade jig and router way, will invest a little more time in making the jigs, making them a bit user friendly.

Thanks for all the tips guys!

 

[motownmartin]

Hi Christof

There is more than one way to skin a cat or cut an accurate tennon, maybe I have missed something, there has been no mention of the table saw.

I made an easy jig to cut tennons on the table saw.

It runs along the T-slot on an Oak runner which fits very snugly with no play, the adjustment for the size of cut works on the same principle, 2 Oak runners running along 2 Dado slots, fixed in positioner by that black knob.

The wood clamps in place by 2 clamps

Make the vertical cuts like so (had to remove crown guard and riving knife) maybe this is why nobody else has mentioned this I feel a slapped wrist coming my way

Then cut off waste using mitre fence

And Bob's your Uncle, Fanny's your Aunt

 

[Chris_belgium]

Hi Christof

There is more than one way to skin a cat or cut an accurate tennon, maybe I have missed something, there has been no mention of the table saw.

I think that would be a bit tricky on the bigger fence rails, tenons will be cut in 1,4m long, +/- 14cm x 8 cm aphselia wich is quite heavy, so probably a lot of stress on the jig. I'd prefer the tool moving instead of moving the wood.

Not that it matters to me anyway, caus fancy $$$$$$ tools like that are wayyyyyyy out of my budget!!

 

[motownmartin]

Hi Christof

There is more than one way to skin a cat or cut an accurate tennon, maybe I have missed something, there has been no mention of the table saw.

I think that would be a bit tricky on the bigger fence rails, tenons will be cut in 1,4m long, +/- 14cm x 8 cm aphselia wich is quite heavy, so probably a lot of stress on the jig. I'd prefer the tool moving instead of moving the wood.

Not that it matters to me anyway, caus fancy $$$$$$ tools like that are wayyyyyyy out of my budget!!

Well it will have to be your hammer and chisel then Christof