Popular Woodworking 2003-10 № 136, страница 61

are long. This trick will save you time because you don't have to clean up the bottoms of your mortises as much, and it will prevent glue from squeezing out if you use too much in the joint.

— CS

Paring Your Shoulders in a Mortise-and-tenon Joint

Before you assemble your joints, you should always clamp them up without glue. That way, you can disassemble everything and fine-tune your joints if you find ugly gaps at this stage. But what if you can't track down the problem? We've found that tuning up the shoulder of the joint will help you fix a variety of problems and make sure you don't hurt the strength of the joint.

First, clamp the tenon in your bench's vise with the tenon pointing straight up. With a sharp chisel, pare away the inside of the shoulder without cutting the outside of the shoulder that shows. Pare away about ¹/32" all the way around and then test the fit again.

This should help you solve problems where your shoulders are angled a bit because of mis-cutting. It also helps out when the tenon's mating surface isn't perfectly square - it's quite common to sand or plane that area so it's bellied a bit.

— CS

Tighten Mortise-and-tenon Joints with a Shoulder Plane

A common problem with a mor-tise-and-tenon joint is that it's easy to make the joint too tight (so it won't go together) or too loose (where it will fall apart).

Even expertly machined joints have this problem because it's tough to hold all your parts with exactly the same pressure as you cut them on your table saw or router table. A ¹/l28" difference can make or break this joint.

Your tenons should slide into your mortises with hand pressure only. The fit should be firm but not forced. To get that every single time, I make all my tenons so they are slightly oversized. Usually I shoot for a tenon that fits a bit too tightly but would go together with a mallet.

Then I get ready for a dry assembly and use my shoulder plane to tune up each joint. A good shoulder plane removes just a couple thousandths of an inch in a pass. This allows you to sneak up on a brilliant fit with only five or six swipes of the plane. It takes about 10 seconds per joint.

Be sure to remove the same amount of material from each face cheek of the tenon by taking the same number of passes on each side of the tenon.

Shoulder planes are available new from Lie-Nielsen, Clifton, Stanley and some other custom plane-makers, such as Shepherd Tool. You also can find them at flea markets or on the Internet.

— CS

Add Rabbets to Dado Joints

Dados are deceivingly simple: You just cut a trench in your work that

Pare the shoulder all around the tenon to help eliminate gaps in this joint. Be sure not to cut the edge of the shoulder, or you'll make your gap worse instead of better.

To get your tenons fitting perfectly, learn to use a shoulder plane.This handy tool will fit your tenons in an extraordinarily controlled manner.

Dados are a pain to get sized just right. So don't bother sizing the dado to the material. Cut the dado undersized and then cut a matching rabbet on its mate.

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