Recently I had an e-mail from a woodworker who is getting started with SketchUp. He was struggling with drawing angled mortises. He was trying to use Push/Pull but of course Push/Pull only works in the direction of the face’s normal. In other words, perpendicular to the face. There is a tool  in the Joint Push/Pull tool set that will run Push/Pull along a vector and that would work but knowing how to do this with the native tools is a good idea. It really isn’t difficult and the same sort of process can be used in other ways, too. After using Push/Pull, you only need to select the end of the mortise and use the Move tool to move it into place. Tapered mortises are also easily created following the same basic idea.

In this video, I’m using a simple model of a Swedish drop leaf table that dates back to around 1950. The legs get mortises for the tenon on the stretcher and the tenons get tapered mortises for the wedges. You’ll note that all the parts are drawn and in place. This makes it easy to use the tenon as a guide for drawing the mortise in the leg and the wedge for drawing the mortise in the tenon. No layout is required to draw these mortises.

–Dave