Benchtop Mortisers

[Allen Bookout]

I am a 2005 Contributor--- to both funds. Just wanted you to know so that I do not feel funny about Member being by my name.

I have been looking at all of the mortise router jigs that I can find trying to find one or a combination that would work without a lot of trouble but they all seem to have drawbacks. It seems like that a table router should be made to work safely but I do not see any way if your mortise is going to be deep at all. The only way for that to work, it seems, is to built a seperate table where you can plunge the router into the workpiece from below. That would take a while and a few dollars.

So----considering the above it seems as though a benchtop mortiser might be the answer. Have any of you used them and do the work well? I would be leaning towart the General International 75-050T or the Woodtec 138-224 or now I see that Powermatic has a new entry, the Model 701.

Any input would be appreicated.

Allen

[Mike Cutler]

Allen.

I have a Delta 14-651 benchtop Mortiser. I have added an XY sliding vise to it, because the fence holddown thing was a royal pain in the keester. I don't even have the stock fence on the machine any longer.
It does what it is supposed to do, but I'm sure that all of the ones in your post work equally as well. I've heard that the Shop Fox Mortiser is also a nice machine, and that the chisel supplied with it are good. When you buy a machine, be sure to by a honing kit for it.
There is another brand. Clico, that is supposed to be very good. The chisels are pretty expensive, and the honing kit is equally expensive. The grind angle of the Clico chisels are different than the angle on the chisels supplied with machines manufactured in taiwan. Something to think about.
Lee Valley has a honing cone for the chisels supplied with the machines from Taiwan. It's pretty inexpensive and does a better job than the tool that comes in the kit.
You really need sharp chisels on a mortiser.
In some respects. I wish that I had gotten the floor standing Powermatic 719( I think) with the tilting head, but floor space is limited for me.
No matter which way you go, look at adding an XY sliding vise to it. It makes it a lot easier, and faster.

Don't worry about the Contributor/ Member label. I hope we never get to the point that participation and response is dictated by that status.

[Roy Wall]

Allen,

The General and Woodtek did get the best marks in FWW review (early summer I think).... they like the "clamping wheel from the front" on both machines..

[Jerry Olexa]

I have the Jet and quite happy with it...

[Roger Everett]

Allen;
I just recently got a General 75-050T. So far, just had time to play with it a bit, but I like it. Can't say much for the 4 chisels ( el- cheepo's ) that come with it though, fortunetly I have some good ones, that I paid $36- $40 for (ea.), when I bought a Delta DP morticing attachment back in the early 90's. Funny thing is I only went in the store to get a 23ga. pin gun, but their price was very good and when I played around with it, I started to breath hard, You know how it is.
Roger

[Allen Bookout]

Thanks Guys! I am starting to get a feeling on what is up with the mortisers.

Roger, I live over in Punta Gorda, Fl so am interested in where you purchased yours

Allen.

[lou sansone]

hi alan ...
I dont know if you are real hard on the bench top morticer at this time or not. if there is still some room in the decision area then I have personally found the powermatic floor model to be real decent for a new machine. If I did not already have it I would probably be looking for a foot operated unit made 40 years ago. But the Powermatic is a pretty decent unit IMHO
lou

[Allen Bookout]

Lou, No I am not set on what I want to do so thanks for the input. Allen

[bill walton]

I also have this unit at my place in Titusville. I got mine at "The Utterguys" in Sanford, near Orlando.

[Peter Mc Mahon]

Hi Allen. I have the General. I basically don't even use it. It has the front wheel clamping and personally I would say it is awful. Maybe it has changed now but on mine the clamping force of the wheel will overpower the clamping force of the fence. If you tighten the wheel to hold the wood in place just a hair too much then you will push the fence backwards. I am not tightening this excessively at all. I have upgraded the clamping bolts of the fence and now use a ratchet to tighten them but the entire unit still wants to slip. Most of the time I just chain drill on the drill press and clean up the mortice with a chisel. Peter

[Dev Emch]

Allen...

I used to own a delta bench top hollow chisel mortiser. I did not like it so I sold it. The lack of a consistent hold down system caused the chisel cut to wonder in and out often creating a slight dentil moulding effect and the high concentricity error often caused the bit to to produce one side of the mortise with a scalloped effect. Fine tuneing and the addition of an X-Y slide vise can solve these issues. With an X-Y slide vise, you will likely need to raise the column a bit. Any X-Y slide vise will work here including those from harbor freight.

Right now, I am using a world war II era Wynig 284 which belonged to a Navy shop on Pearl prior to Dec 7th. As such, it lacks many of the refinements found on newer generation Wynig 284s. Using it is like using a sewing machine because the second motor runs the vertical oscillation of the head. The tables on these obsolete boat anchors are patterned after a milling machine so the wood never moves. Its clamped into place with the front clamp and then a wheel controls the left and right movement of the table. Some of the newer floor models have similar features. But a foot operated model from a lessor known make such as yates will often cost much less than a new floor model from powermatic or general or even jet.

But no matter how careful you are, hollow chisel mortises have issues. They do not have the same smooth wall finishes that a router based mortiser can give you and its easy for the spurs to punch through the bottom of a deep blind mortise. Most of the chisels used today are for soft woods. You can tell because the spurs are much longer and agressive than the spurs used for hard woods. I lucked out here. About two years ago, i found a guy in Australia cleaning out an old woodworking tool store and he found several boxes of 1/4 inch J.E. Morrison & Sons hollow chisel mortise bits made in Sheffield, England. He placed some of them on Ebay and I snaged them. Later on I found out about the rest of what he had and just bought everything I could get my hands on. Namely because these were made of sheffield steel but also because they were hardwood spurs instead of softwood spurs. Right now, its hard to say who is making hardwood spurs. I am quite happy with how my wynig is cutting mortises at this time.

But about a year ago, I found a Maka STV-161 mortiser at an automobile repro yard across from a arborist and woodcutting business. I used to buy raw walnut and oak logs which I cut up into veneer from these guys. They told me about this "wacko" woodworking machine that no one knew about nor did anyone know how it worked. I went over there and had a look and talked to the folks there. Instantly, I recognized this beast. It was a single head, late model, german made, oscillating chisel mortiser. And its white and blue paint job told me that its 1). A maka STV-161 and 2). its a very late model.

Now Dankert in the Carolinas was the exclusive agent for these and I found out that Maka stopped making these because there is more money to made in CNC gantry routers. Maka makes the finest multi axis CNC gantry routers known to man. You can use a single program and a block of wood and carve out an entire santa claus statue in minutes. The last SIX Maka mortisers ever made were sold to Dankert and these were imported in groups of three. The time line was about 2001. This mortiser was one of the last three imported based on its nameplate tag which contains the shipping date of the machine. Clearly I did not tell these guys what they were sitting on. With a sales price of $19,500 dollars (new), I was going to work on these guys.

Turns out this repro yard had been retained to repro this machine from a local cabinet shop that had leased the machine from a leasing company in the north west. I did some home grown detective work and finally had the number to call these guys. I finally worked a deal with this outfit to allow them to get this leasing "lemon" off their books. They had been sitting on this for about a year and were glad to see it go. Aside from the oak sawdust in the bottom of the machine, it was in new condition. In fact, it was installed into my shop with no detectable scratches whereas my hofmann has some significant cosmetic damage to the first 2 inches of the base which required some body work to fix. And the hofmann was new. Later on, I found the air pressure gage busted and so I replaced the gage and the external reguluator. No biggie.

The STV is a very complex mortiser. It has an electric motor driving the mortise head gear box but the feed system is operated by an air powered computer system. I use the term computer because there is a mechanical type of program defining how the feed system moves in and out again along with several pnuematic interlocks to the electric system. Air pressure applied to this mechanical "software" makes it happen. So you need both air and electricity to make this work.

What makes this mortiser unique is that it cuts a mortise just like a router bit does however, the router bit is circular cutter whereas the maka is a linear, recipricating action. The bit has teeth on the base of the chisel and an on the leading side of the chisel. Often, you can stack a few bits on top of one another along with a spacer to cut a series of exact mortises for multi finger tenons. It cuts an almost perfect rectangular hole with no issues and very smooth, machine cut sides. With proper fitting, I can create a mortise and tenon joint that actually pops when I pull them together and makes a rude sound when I push them together. Often, you will want to cut a pressure relief groove on the side of the tenon or you may suffer a crack due to hydraulic pressure buildup during glue up. I like to keep about a 10 thou gap between the tennon the mortise to allow the joint to come together and then the glue helps expand the tenon a bit and the joint will never come apart again.

You cannot get this level of fit with a hollow chisel mortiser. You can get this level of fit using a router and a mortise and tenon jig setup. But you do have the round ends to deal with. Realisticly, this feature is not traditional so you may need to use a chisel to square it up. But once glued up, your not going to see the rounded ends and the rounded ends may actually be better. The square ends can create stress concentrations at the corners of the square hole. In the old days, these mortises were chopped using a mortise chisel. Thus, the holes are rectangular. In the modern day, these holes are more often than not rounded because router bits cut the mortises. My work is traditional so I need the square holes and I dont have the time to chisel all those rounded mortises square. So I usually use the maka to cut these these days.

As good as the maka is, the smallest square mortise it cuts is a 3/4 inch square hole. Now I can cut a 1/4 inch mortise but its going to be 1/4 by 3/4 inch in length or longer. So when doing things like stickley spindles, I find that I have to resort back to using the wynig 284 for this. I can quickly punch a 1/4 inch square mortise. I can also punch a stepped mortise in which I may have a 3/4 in square hole and then punch it deeper with a 1/4 square hole. This is extremly hard to do with a router.

Also, maka machines use many different size chisels. You can get them in various thicknesses but you also need to specify both depth and width of cut. My favorate chisel is a 35 mm deep by 1/4 inch thick by 1 inch long bit. If I need to make a 1.5 or 2 inch long mortise, I need to do two setups with the same chisel. Also, when doing a haunched mortise, I can use a 2 inch wide chisel to cut a 1/4 inch by 2 inch mortise the depth of my haunch. I then follow up with the 1/4 inch by 1 inch by 35 mm deep chisel on an offset to cut the final depth of the remainder of the mortise. It creates a picture perferct haunched mortise.

These can also be setup to cut franking mortises as well as a multitude of other mortises. But when you have a single job and dont wish to spend some serious coin on bits for a single job, I often resort back to just using the wynig because it can often do simple, one off jobs with concurrent tooling.

So overall, the cutting of machine mortises is not black and white. There are lots of ways to do this. But when looking for a single lowest common denominator, you will find that a floor model, hollow chisel mortiser is the way to go. Not because its bigger and bader but because it has a decent means of clamping the wood in one place and forcing the machine to move around the wood vis a viz its table. This creates a more accurate mortise.

Please note that these are just my empirical views based on cutting a number of these joints with different machines. Your actual views may vary.

[Alan Turner]

Allen,
If you decided to devote floor space to a HCM, and if Lou's comment on foot operated makes sense, then you might try to source an older Powermatice Model No. 10. It's about 500 lbs. of milled cast iron, and you may find the price range to be just about $1000 - $1500. These are heavy, accurate beasts and while not regarded as the very best, are a pretty good value, IMHO. Of course, you need to eat enough to be able to stand on the foot pedal and get the cut you need. The one in my new shop is single phase, which is convenient for many, but I don't know if it was originally a single phase or was later converted.

[Roger Everett]

Allen :
I got it at Utterguys, they're in Sanford, just north of Orlando. They usually have very good prices, I went there for my PC 23ga. pinner, because they were ,IIRC, $20 cheaper then Amazon. If you want to check them out, their site sucks a bit, for navigating, but. www.utterguys.com They also seem to have more then the site lists, slight updating problem.
Roger

[tod evans]

allen, i spent my money on a floor mount and good chisels. .02 tod

[Jay Knepper]

I would rather deal with the issues of router jigs than the issues with benchtop mortisers, which seem to be a poor solution. How many times have you heard that someone "loved their square chisel mortiser"?

With a router you can easily produce nearly perfect mortises, whereas the best feature of the dedicated machines is that they produce square corners ... with a pretty ugly looking slot between them.