Courtyard Gate – #5 Cutting Pieces to Length, Sanding to Thickness & Making Mortises

With the thickness sander calibrated I loaded it with 120 grit sandpaper and started the process of bringing like pieces down to a uniform thickness.  The top photo shows one of the door stiles (vertical part of door frame) ready to be run through the sander.  The sanding process took several hours because there are a lot of glued up pieces to be machined, both faces need to be worked on and less than 1/64” was removed per pass because I wanted to take the minimum required off to end up with the maximum thickness.  Also, because cedar is a soft wood and has a tendency to build up on the sandpaper I frequently stopped and to clean the drum’s sandpaper.  The bottom photo shows all the different glued up pieces for both doors.

1. Stile blanks
2. Rail blanks
3. Latilla blanks
4. Lower inset door panel blanks
5. Center circle blanks for Zia applique on doors
6. Blanks for testing of door frame mortise and tenon joints

Cutting the stiles and rails to their final width and length is next.  Cutting to width is done on the table saw and cutting to length is done on the chop saw.  The stiles have any defects cut from one end then using a stop block on the chop saw they get cut to their final length.  The rails are a little different in that they use two stop blocks, one to cut each end.  While the blanks are a little long, due to material size limitations, the screw holes used during the gluing process won’t get cut completely away.  In the top photo the red arrow points to where the left end cut will be made with the insert giving a closer view.  The bottom photo shows the setup for making the right cut and the red arrow points to the resulting left side cut from above that bisects the screw hole.  These holes will not be a problem as they won’t show after the tenons get cut.

Next, I needed to patch a couple of small defects that did not get cut away when the pieces got cut to length.  The left two photos show a small knot getting drilled out and the right photo shows the plug cut to go in the hole.

Below the left photo is of the glued in plug before it gets trimmed flush with a chisel.  The center is after trimming and a light sanding.  The far right is the other much smaller plugged hole.

Cutting the mortises in the stiles is done with the mortising machine that utilizes a hollow chisel along with an interior drill.  For this project a ¾” wide mortise gets cut.  I had never used the ¾” mortising chisel set so it was still in factory condition meaning it had a rough grind.  That’s shown in the top two photos which while they were flat, they were in no way smooth.  To effortlessly make a clean cut the rough ground surface needs to be brought to almost a mirror smooth finish.  The process starts with a piece of 120 grit silicon carbide sandpaper stuck on a flat granite plate.  Water is used for lubrication and hand sanding on each of the four sides is done working through finer and finer grits ending with 1500 grit paper.  Red rouge on a wheel mounted in the lathe gives the final polish shown in the bottom photo.  It takes about two hours and is not a lot of fun but it’s necessary and only needs to be done once.

Installing the bit and hollow chisel is a four-step process. 

1. The chisel gets installed with a penny spacer between it and the mortiser head using the large screw to lock it in place (top left).
2. The drill gets run up inside the chisel flush with the bottom of the chisel then tightened in the drill’s chuck (right photo).
3. The chisel in the mortiser head is loosened then the penny spacer between the chisel and mortiser head is removed.
4. The chisel is pushed tight up to the mortiser head and squared with the base clamping assembly, then tightened. (bottom left). 

Here is the mortising machine with the freshly polished and sharpened bit/chisel set installed.  Because the top and bottom mortises are the same size and located the same distance from the end, I can utilize the machine’s built-in stops.  They are set while making the test piece show here.  Once set they allow me to clamp the stile in the same location, have the mortise centered side to side in the stile, establish the starting and ending mortise location along with the mortise’s depth.

With everything set up the actual top and bottom mortises in stiles can be cut with me only doing some spot testing as they are made just to make sure none of the stops had moved.  Only addition was adding a stand on the left to support the length of the stile.

The sequence for making the mortise starts with drilling/cutting a hole at one end then the other end and finally in the center.  That’s followed by centering two more full width holes then finishing by cleaning up the small remaining bits ending with a nearly clean mortise shown in the bottom right photo below.  I like to cut full width holes or centering the chisel on thinner leftovers when possible because if overlapping holes are cut, I am concerned that it may put an excentric load on the drill/chisel assembly.

With the end mortises cut in the stiles there remains just the center one.  The red arrow in the drawing shows where it is located and the photo shows their layout on the four stiles.  The dotted line is the edge of the rail and the solid line is the edge of the mortise.  The red highlighted area shows the area to be removed for the mortise.

Because the stiles are too long for the end stop to work here each of the center mortises have to be located by hand shown below.  When clamped tight the end stops can be set and the mortises cut like the others except the initial clamping location has to be set manually using the square.

Next Up – Cutting Tenons, More Mortises & Making Plugs for Screws