Courtyard Gate – #6 Cutting Tenons, More Mortises & Making Plugs for Screws

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.

Using the fence on the bandsaw (left photo) a consistent width cut is made to remove the offset waste which completes the majority of the work on the tenon.  All the tenons are cut a couple hundredths thick to leave a buffer for final fitting in case there was any variance in the rail thickness.  The right photo has them stacked up ready for final fitting.

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

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

Courtyard Gate – #4 Gluing up Stiles & Lower Panels, Making Latilla Sample

Gluing up the three pieces to make the stile blanks are next.  The process is the same as with the rails except these assemblies are about two and a half times longer and I can only do one at a time so with curing time it takes me four days to glue all of them up.

Once glued up all the stiles get the same cleanup and trimming as the rails so no need to go through that again.  Here’s the set of the four stiles plus the six rails needed with their edges trimmed down close to the final width.  Just in case a problem shows up I am going to let these blanks set for a few days before moving on to the next step.

Next is to edge glue two pieces together for each of the three boards needed for the lower door panels shown highlighted in the drawing.  After cutting the parts oversize they get glued up.  Shown in the right photo are three panels glued along with the remaining three cut and ready to be glued.

The upper section upper section of the gate is mostly open but has three latillas in each gate section shown highlighted in the drawing.  I wanted to use cedar rather than pine for rot resistance but have been unable to locate anything other than pine ones.  It would be easy to glue up three or four layers of the cedar (top right photo) and turn them down on the lathe to a straight cylinder (bottom right photo) or a decorative turning like a stair baluster.  However, neither of those fit in with the desired southwestern design. 

As an alternate I will do some testing to see if I can create the hand peeled/hewn look starting with the cylinder using different methods.  Below are different tools to try.  Some may work and some or all may not work.  Starting at the top left corner working clockwise is my power plane, angle grinder with carbide teeth and a coarse grit sanding disk that can also mount on the grinder, a pneumatic die grinder with carbide burr, three wood rasps a hand plane and pneumatic impact chisel.

To replicate the hand peeled/hewn look on a turned cylinder I needed a faceted layout to work from and chose six faces.  To do the layout a compass is set to the cylinder’s radius and with the point positioned on the edge an arc is drawn through the center.  The point where that arc intersects the cylinder’s perimeter is my center point for the next arc.  After that the intersecting points along the edge are connected with a straight line.  Result is the layout in the top photo.  The bottom photo shows the cylinder set back in the lathe and has straight lines drawn on the face to act as my guide.

My first tool was the pneumatic impact chisel and it didn’t work at all because the blade is free to rotate and I couldn’t control the angle of the cut.  The power plane and hand plane gave me a flat smooth surface that looked too flat, precise and not organic enough.  The pneumatic die grinder with carbide burr gave me the ability to create a more organic surface but the result was too rough as in the top photo below.  Same result with the hand rasps.  The angle grinder with carbide teeth gave me the needed organic look but left a surface with its teeth marks and the surface was not smooth enough.  Changing the carbide cutter to a coarse grit sanding disk helped but still left unacceptable sanding arcs (bottom photo) in the finished surface.

I didn’t have a finer grit sanding disk for the angle grinder so took a 120-grit disk made for a random orbital sander and cut it to fit in the angle grinder.   The good news is it gave me just what I wanted for a finish shown in the top photo but the 120-grit disk is not nearly sturdy enough for the purpose.  Knowing the grit needed I got a 120-grit disk (right photo) purpose made for use with the grinder.

With a successful test the leftovers from making the stiles and rails get cut down to make the six four-layer latilla blanks needed.  Here are three blanks glued up along with the three waiting for the first group’s glue to cure before they get glued together. 

Once the second set of blanks get glued the glue runs are cleaned off, trimmed like the stiles and rails then set aside until needed later.  At this point I think that all of the laminating needed for the project is done.  There has been a lot of time spent to go from the rough sawn cedar fence boards to smooth, straight, flat and with parallel edges then gluing all the pieces together.  As a matter of fact, it has taken three plus quarts of waterproof Type III glue to get to this point.

Because I stopped surfacing the rough sawn planks when a smooth surface was achieved the thickness varied from .55” to .48” thick.  Mixing and matching them gave me stile and rail glue-ups all about four hundredths of an inch over the nominal target of 1 ½” thick.    My next step is to run these pieces through the thickness sander to get them all to a consistent thickness.   The thickness sander is the tool to do that but I noticed while making the File Handles & Case project the sander did not give parallel surfaces.  The problem was the edge nearest the motor was slightly thinner than the outboard edge.  This isn’t a problem as my old thickness sander had to be adjusted too.  Process is to take a couple of spacers the same thickness (I used two 3/8” drill bits) and adjust things until the bed and drum were parallel.  The photos show the bits set in place for adjustment.  When they both just touch the drum the bed and drum are parallel.  

When making the adjustment a problem showed up in that there was not enough adjustment range to bring the drum and bed parallel.  The solution was to add a shim (red arrow) to get the drum and bed almost parallel then fine tune with the machine’s built-in adjustment.  In the end I got the difference down to two hundredths of an inch.

Next Up – Cutting Pieces to Length, Sanding to Thickness & Making Mortises

Courtyard Gate – #3 Edge Trimming, a Twisted off Screw & Gluing up Rails

The boards are left to rest for a few days flat with spacers for air movement to see if any of them moved and all are smooth, flat and most have one true edge.  They then get sorted into stacks by my estimation of how wide they will be after the one rough edge gets cut parallel to the routed edge.  The photo shows them broken down in 1/16” steps from 5 3/8” wide on the left and 5” wide on the right. 

To rip the second long edge parallel to the routed edge the table saw is used.  As I said above most of the boards were fine but a few of the edges had bowed a tiny bit, less than 1/16” while they sat.  To help mitigate those inconsistencies in the routed edge the 8’ long level gets clamped to the fence and the routed edge is run against that.

With all the boards now having their two long edges straight and parallel I can finally start cutting blanks that will be face glued together to make the required 1 ½” thick pieces.  The first group are the top, bottom and middle rails shown highlighted in the top left drawing.  The top right photo shows a typical set of boards cut slightly oversize to allow for trimming.  The bottom photo shows the 12 pieces needed to make the top and bottom rails for both doors.  The center rail pieces are not shown.

To keep the three layers aligned while they get glued up a screw gets added at each end about ½” in from the edge.  A stop block and fence locates the hole so I don’t have to measure each one.  The top left photo show shows that setup and the lower left photo is a closer view.  The right photo is of the screw installed after countersinking the hole.

Because the gate will be outside a waterproof glue is used to prevent glue failure.  Here are the three pieces that make up one of the top or bottom rails.  The black thing next to the glue bottle is a toothed glue spreader that spreads the glue to a consistent thickness much faster than can be done otherwise.  Spreading the glue isn’t shown as it’s always a mad rush to get the glue on, pieces aligned and clamped within the glue’s working time.  It’s going to be more fun getting this done for the stiles when each of the boards are almost three times longer.

This is what two of the rails look like glued up.  First a 6-mil piece of plastic the glue does not stick to goes down so the assembly doesn’t glue itself to the work bench.  The glued three-layer assembly with the screws run in for alignment is next.  That’s followed by a thick flat plank to spread the clamp’s pressure evenly across the assembly.  Last four heavy duty clamps are added and tightened down until the boards cry uncle.

The first set of rails went fine however in the second batch one of the screws used for holding the boards in alignment twisted off when I went to remove it.  This leaves me with a real problem in that my planned saw cut for trimming to length goes right through the center of the hole now occupied by a broken off screw.  Removing the broken part of the screw was going to be a problem no matter how it got done.  After some thought I decided to work my way from the top down using a wood chisel until I could see the end of the screw then carefully remove the wood until the screw was exposed.  The top photo shows one of the screws that cooperated when removed and the other is the broken one.  The bottom photo is a closer view of the broken screw that now can be removed.  I believe the problem was when the screw was run in after the glue was applied the threads got coated and the screw got glued in place.  In the future the screw threads will get coated with wax and removed an hour after being clamped while the glue has not yet fully cured.

After an overnight cure the clamps are removed and the glue mostly cleaned off with a paint scraper.  The bottom photo shows the edge cleaned up (red arrow) so none of the remaining glue sticks out beyond the clean top board’s edge.  That edge will act as my true straight edge when it’s run through the table saw to trim the opposite edge.  The piece will then be flipped and the first reference edge trimmed so all the pieces are flush with the assembly and a little oversize.  There is one more set of rails to do and then it’s on to the stiles or vertical frame pieces.

First, step for the stiles is to cut them to rough length on the chop saw but before doing that I screwed a fence extension to the top of my workbench to the left of the saw to make sure that long pieces were square with the saw blade.  This had been on my to-do list for a long time and now seemed like a good time to add it.  The top photo shows the finished MDF piece (red arrow) screwed down.  To make sure it’s in-line with the fence attached to the saw I clamped my 8’ level to the saw’s fence then clamped the MDF extension to the level and lastly screwed the extension to the workbench’s top.

The new fence to the left of the saw’s blade is used when the right end is cut square. 

That’s followed by sliding the board to the right where a stop block (red arrow) is set so left end can be cut.  This two-step process gives me square cuts on both ends and makes all pieces the same length.

The table saw is then used to cut the boards to their oversize width trimming off knots, or other bad bits off the edges.  The red arrows point to the knot that gets cut away and the insert is a closer view.  Sometimes only one edge needs to be cut other times there are flaws on both sides that need to be removed.  When done almost all the pieces are clear wood with no defects at all.

Next Up – Gluing up Stiles & Lower Panels, Making Latilla Sample