I’m in the process of building my first dining table & was going to use mortise & tenon to join the aprons to the table legs (cherry aprons/legs). I was going to use through mortise & tenon, but thought that the movement of the wood would kill the “flushness” (for lack of a better word) of the apron w/ the leg.
In either case: I’m worried about expansion/contraction if it’s glued. that won’t allow for any movement will it? Should I just not glue it? Would through mortise & tenon not stay flush?
Thanks much for any advice/suggestions/etc!!
Jeremy
Replies
If you have two rails entering the leg that are at right angles to each other you can't do through M&T's for both. One only can possibly pass right through, and the second tenon has to stop shy of the first through tenon.
Additionally you remove a lot of wood from the morticed member and the strength of the leg can be compromised. Better would be to let the tenons penetrate into a stopped mortice, one from each face, and mitre the inside corner of the tenon at the end so that the outside face of each tenon goes almost to the bottom of the mortice-- for a dining table I suggest you make the mortice about 2-1/4" to 2-1/2" deep, assuming the leg is thick enough. This gives you substantail glue strength. Unless your tenons are wider than about 5-1/2" to 6" just glue it all up. It's only at about these dimensions that I start thinking about creating a forked tenon and gluing only one fork so that the tenoned member can expand and contract freely towards one edge-- the forks don't have to be same width either, but that's another story.
As for keeping the show faces of both the mortised member and the tenoned member flush, snug joinery should take care of this, and you can incorporate a haunch of some sort on the top edge of the tenoned member to help too.
Alternatively, simply offset the rail face in from the leg face by an 1/8" or so thus creating a reveal and you eliminate the problem of flush fitting altogether. Slainte.
This forum post is now archived. Commenting has been disabled