Here is what the stiles look like with all the mortises
cut. The six stacked pieces in the
background are the rails that will get tenons cut on them next.
Before starting to make the tenons I checked to make sure
the miter fence was square with the blade.
Checking with a square can get close but when making these large tenons
close isn’t good enough. There is a
simple method that requires just two scrap pieces of wood 2” to 3” wide and
about 15” long with one long edge marked “Fence” (red arrow). This edge is butted up against the fence and
both pieces are cut.
Next, the cut edge is set on the table saw with the
“Fence” note pointed to the right and the pieces are slid until they touch as
in the left photo. There should be no
gap between the long edges since both pieces were cut with the same fence/saw
blade orientation. If there is a gap
it’s probably due to the long edges being warped. Here there is no gap so the right board gets
rotated 180 degrees so now the “Fence” marks are pointed toward each other (the
“Fence" text is on the back of the right board) as in the right photo. If there is no gap along the long vertical
edges then the fence is square with the blade.
If there is a gap at the top or bottom it will be twice the out-of-square
amount and the fence needs to be adjusted.
The process is repeated until there is no gap.
Cutting the tenons is next. The cheeks or outside faces are cut first
using a shop made tenoning jig shown in the left photo. The right photo is a closer view after the
first cut has been made. To cut the
opposing cheek the piece is rotated 180 degrees and cut. Since the tenons and rails are all the same
thickness all six rails get cut with the same setup.
Next is to cut away the thin waste piece on both sides of
the tenon. In the photo below the top
waste piece has been cut away and the bottom is ready to cut. Once set all the rails get cut the same.
The last bit of work on the table saw it to make the
first cut for the removal of the tenon’s offset. The left photo shows the back side of the
rail before the cut and the right photo is after the cut has been made.
There is one other bit of work before the final fitting
and that was to take my small hand plane and chamfer the leading edge of the
tenon (red arrow). This will make the
initial insertion of the tenon into the mortise easier.
The final fitting is done on the router table using a ½”
straight router bit. Using the router
table’s fence the tenon is pushed up against a miter fence running in the gold
track to keep the piece square with the router table fence. However, before doing cutting I measured the
tenon thickness and wrote the size on the tenon then worked fitting from the
thickest tenon to the thinnest. Process
is to raise the router bit until it just touches the face of the tenon. Multiple passes are made across the router
bit until the entire face has had a skim cut made. The board is flipped and the other side of
the tenon gets the same treatment. A
test fit is made and if the fit is too tight the router bit is raised a few
thousands of an inch and the process is repeated until the tenon just slides in
place. I then move on to the next
thickest tenon.
Here are the two frames dry fitted. In checking them for squareness the diagonals
were within 1/32” of matching which is pretty good but I think I can probably
improve that some when gluing them up.
After disassembling the dry-fit doors some more mortises
need to be made. They are for the
structural screws that will reinforce the joints between the stiles and
rails. The drawing below shows an X-Ray
view of the corner joint where the 4” screw goes from the bottom of the mortise
through the stile into the tenon and on into the body of the rail.
In the photos below the highlighted areas show where
these mortises will be cut. The top
photo shows the layout done on one of the stiles with the other three stiles
set so the mortises for the tenons are shown.
The bottom two photos are a closer view.
With the mortises laid out stops are set in the mortising
machine and they get cut just like before.
To not leave an exposed hole where the screws will be
installed a plug gets glued in. I could
have glued up a ¾” square block a couple feet long and cut 1” long pieces
off. The problem with that is the
exposed face would be end grain and I want the plug’s surface that’s exposed to
be face grain to match the grain on the stile.
There are a couple of ways to get that but I chose gluing up layers so
the face grain was at the end of the square block. This method also let me use up a bunch of
leftover pieces that either had knots, splits or were not going to be a lot of
use. Below is my starting group of
rejects. To get the needed size block
requires a few steps. 
First is to rip the rejects to a common width then face
glue and clamp them together in layers shown in the top photo. The bottom photo shows the glued-up
blanks. Only the bottom two blanks will
get used for now.
These two blanks are roughly the same width and get their
edges trimmed so they are flush. Once
that’s done, they get cut into pieces the same length as their width on the
chop saw using a stop block to get consistent results. The results are the six
pieces in the top photo. Those get face
glued into one long stack that when clamped up looks like this.
The glued-up block is then cut in half using the bandsaw
because it’s too thick to cut in a single pass on the table saw. 
The resulting
blocks are thin enough to trim their edges flush on the table saw which are
then ripped into four square oversize blanks.
They will be set aside for a while to see if there will be any movement
before trimming to final size.
Next Up – Making the Latillas & a Jig – Part 1
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