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Saturday, July 10, 2010

I have a haunch about these tenons

Often I use router bits to cut cope and stick joinery to build smaller cabinet doors. The advantage to this method is they are easy to cut as long as you have a basic cope and stick router bit set and a router table. The other advantage is that cope and stick allows you to cut a profile on the inside of the frame - the rails simply have the reverse image of the profile cut into them to receive the stiles. The disadvantage to this method is you need specialized router bit sets, which can be expensive. Secondly, the long grain glue surface is limited to the small stub tenon or "stick" at each joint. For many applications, especially for small doors in casework like this project, cope and stick is a good choice. However, the plans for this particular sideboard call for simple square cut rails and stiles so a stronger joint - haunched tenons - can be used in this case.

This episode is a bit longer, but details the entire process I used for cutting these odd looking joints. But I can assure you, the amount of long grain glue surface the haunched tenons provide ensures these doors are nearly indestructible. My process consisted entirely of power tools (except for some fine tuning of the panel), but hand tools could just as easily give good results. I found with power tools, the process is highly repeatable, so if you need to batch out a number of doors, you could do so with ease.


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

He Rob,

Nice episode ones again. I really like how much time you take in explaining things.

I posted your blog in the dutch forum of woodworkers since i truly think that the way you post your video's and do projects is of great education.

Ralph

Rob Bois said...

Thanks Ralph, I really appreciate it.

Ryan said...

Rob,

Great video. Thanks for taking the time to show your process. I enjoy seeing how people do the same thing in different ways. I've done the haunched mortise and tenon joints before too and they are really strong. Only thing I did differently was use a dado stack to cut the tenons since I don't have a tenoning jig. But, I do have a mortiser, so that part for me is much faster. I'll have to get a tenoning jig sooner or later though.

I noticed that you are using a mic now instead of talking to your camera from across the room. It's great that we can hear you in the video now, but the sound quality is almost like listening to you talk though a phone. But, like I said, at least we can hear you!

Rob Bois said...

Thanks Ryan. There are always many ways to achieve a task, and lots of factors go into the decision. Speed to set up, precision, repeatability, safety, and even noise and dust. Tool availability can always be a hurdle, but also a good excuse to go spend some money. As for the audio, I did finally get an external mic, but am still dialing it in. There seem to be some external factors at play that I am working out.