Making repeated cuts when you have a large amount to complete is always easier with a jig!
To make a large amount of consistently sized tenons on short and long stretchers for multiple Garden Planters, I decided to make a simple jig to use with a straight bit in my palm router.
I had a load of scrap pieces of white melamine coated chipboard left over from an old dismantled wardrobe, so started with three pieces to make a base and a channel for each stretcher to slide in and out of. The melamine gave a good smooth surface for each piece to move around on easily for cutting. I then added some additional pieces as a stop block at the end to ensure the workpiece was inserted to the correct distance and then added an additional top piece to hold the workpiece in place while routing.
By setting the depth of the router bit, it allowed me to remove a consistent amount of material from each pass across the end of the workpiece, starting with half the distance and then lowering the bit to the full depth. That meant the router didn’t have to work so hard and there was less tear-out to the workpiece.
I fitted a quick clamp to the jig to hold the workpiece in place with each pass and used a piece of mdf to prevent the router from moving any further along the workpiece than the marked shoulder as I made each pass.
I also made a quick holder for the vacuum hose to assist with extracting the chips from the router. I used a scrap piece of pine and some thicker pieces of mdf, which allowed me to get the hole to the correct size very quickly due to the ease of sanding mdf (while wearing a dust mask!).
The final jig allowed me to quickly insert a workpiece, complete a couple of passes to remove the material, release the clamp and rotate the workpiece and then complete more passes. By repeating these steps and working my way around the workpiece, I was able to create pretty perfect tenons on each end of the stretchers relatively quickly.
This was a quick and simple jig to create but made producing tenons on each of the ends of 8 stretchers for 4 planters (totalling 64 tenons!) so much faster than doing it by hand with a chisel. I think there is a time and a place for care and precision in woodworking, taking your time to produce highly accurate cuts by hand using a chisel. In this case, as each mortise hole was then specifically sized to accommodate each tenon, I could batch produce the tenons using power tools to speed the process along! 🔨
The Woodworking Scientist 