My wife and I went to Woodcraft this morning and picked up a new Steel City Mortiser. Retail $280+tax-$15 coupon-$40 SC rebate=$243 final cost (once I get the check from SC) Woodcraft is a new SC distributor, and I got their last mortiser. True story–after buying the mortiser, we went to lunch at a Chinese place. We were reading our fortune cookies at the end of the meal. My fortune, and I’m not making this up, read: “Today is a good day to buy yourself a present. You deserve it.” She hit me and said “What does it really say?”

The mortiser assembly was pretty straight forward. I had a couple of questions due to some minor indiscrepancies between the instructions and what I had to work with. A quick call to Steel City solved that–they said they need to update the manual. Assembly took maybe 30 minutes. I placed the 1/4″ chisel and bit, adjusted per instructions, and made my first mortise. I am very pleased with the machine. It is simple and easy to use. It is well made and well thought out, and the chisels came razor sharp. Just a little honing and I was ready to go. I have one question that I am going to call back about. The downstroke force, even when not plunging into wood, seems a bit much. The upstroke is very easy. Don’t know if this is normal or what. Next week I’m off to the sawmill in Huntsville to buy lumber and then I’ll be cranking out a couple of Greene and Greene end tables for the den. Tom