Through Mortise and Tusk Tennon

[John Pahl]

[quote=Brian Kent;818619]OK, I've done some mortise and tenon work, but what is a "tusk tenon"?

Tusk tenon - a kind of mortise and tenon joint that uses a wedge-shaped key to hold the joint together

[Brian Kent]

Got it. Thanks John.

[Dave Houseal]

Ah....work both sides towards the middle....I'm now confident the next set of through mortises will be MUCH nicer

No time to redo the ones I made last week because xmas is just around the corner, but the roughness around the edges has been bothering me. It still looks decent...but not nearly as crisp as I'd like.

[Tony Shea]

If you don't have a mortise gauge handy and regular marking guage can work as well, preferably two set at different measurements. But you could just change the one marking guage after all the marks for the first measurement are done then go on to the next, a bit more difficult and requires you to look ahead a bit more.

The biggest difference in what my steps are between yours is that I always cut my mortises first! Then I size my tenons to fit the mortise. Shaving off the faces of tenons that are oversized is much easier for me than cutting the mortise walls to size. And accurate layout with a marking knife is imperitive! Bringing a line from one face to another is most accurately done with a knife, no comparison to a pencil mark.