Joinery 101

The front part and the corresponding back part of a hutch chest are each made of two stiles which serve as legs that are joined to either side of a shorter centerpiece. Our goal here is a pegged tongue-and-groove joint, which is in a way also going to be a kind of lap joint or mortise and tendon joint. If what I just wrote doesn't make any sense and horribly butchered those terms, it's because I'm a joinery novice and I'm still not exactly sure how the nomenclature applies to a joint that serves multiple functions like this. Anyway, this is how we proceeded. Don showed me how a mortise is delineated with a mortising pin by calibrating the distance of the teeth and then drawing scratches across the edge. Both the mortise and the tenon in this case will stop before the point where the bottom and top of the boards are located, so that the completed joint won't shift up and down.

Don showed me how a mortise such as this is chiseled the old fashioned way. It is important to make shallow stop cuts with the chisel so that the wood grain does not cause the wood to shear off in an uncontrolled manner, and to remove small chips and shavings bit by bit. The passage about chiseling a mortise in the short story I wrote for this independent study, called "The Masterpiece", is inspired by my own experience of trial and error with Don.

Eventually I was chiseling entirely on my own, and in the meantime Don carved the mortises in the other stiles the modern way using a machine tool. The point was for me to learn how it was done in the old days, but in the interest of time we also had to speed things up. Once my mortise was finished, I had to cut the tenons of the centerpieces on each end so as to fit better into the mortises. The rectangular mortise is the one that I hand-chiseled, while the one with rounded ends is one of those that Don put through the machine.