I am making my first cabinet, and used a RAS to cut the tenons. Having not the greatest dado stack in the world, they are a little rough.
Looked at shoulder planes, but even cheap ones are $150! Apart from hand sanding, any other recommendations?
Check Ebay?
Jim
use a block plane to clean up the majority, then use a chisel to finish up to the shoulder.
I use a Stanley #78 plane for this task. Got it on ebay for $30 +shipping.
Art
A 1" chisel, a file, or a wood rasp?
The LN 140 or Rabbet plane will do a good job.
Any reason for not trying/using a tenoning jig on a tablesaw? Assuming you have a tablesaw that is. Just curious.
-- Regards,
Dean Bielanowski Editor, Online Tool Reviews
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Well, you could buy a new #90 for a lot less than that, but you'd probably have to do a bit of tuning to get it to perform well. The last batch of m&t's that I cut I just used a 1" chisel to clean them up. It worked just fine, and actually gave me better control than a plane.
In fact, I'm thinking I'll do them all that way from now on.
Chuck Vance
Your RAS, assuming it's tuned properly, can be used with a good blade to first cut the shoulders. The cheeks can then be cut by setting the motor bevel to 90 degrees counterclockwise and placing the work on an auxillary table with the top of the blade set the shoulder depth above the aux table and the right edge of the blade set even with the left edge of the aux table. The motor is then drawn through the cheek cut leaving a nice smooth cheek and shoulder. I posted (scary to some) pics on ABPW a few weeks ago.
-Doug
snipped-for-privacy@swt.edu (Conan the Librarian) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@posting.google.com:
That would be my suggestion too. It might help to have a guide block of the appropriate thickness to rest the chisel on, working bevel up. That would help avoid the tendency to gradually cut deeper as you work to shoulder end of the tenon.
John
Yeah, that's probably a good idea for when you make a cut towards the shoulder. (Another help might be to use the chisel bevel-down. That tends to keep it from digging in and diving.) On my last batch of tenons, I found that I was having my best success by making a crossgrain paring cut. I sawed them by hand and left the scribe marks intact. Then I was able to reference those marks and go across grain with a slightly skewed cut. You can tell when you hit your scribe mark, as you raise a bit of "fuzz" which is the waste side of the scribe.
Final cleanup was then a light cut back towards the shoulder to make sure the cheek was flat and there were no "crumbs" left at the junction of shoulder and cheek.
Chuck Vance
Forget the dado. Remember that the radial saw can cut with the blade horizontal as easily as it does with the blade vertical. Also remember that the height adjustment on it has remarkably high precision. Use those capabilities and a little ingenuity and you'll find that it's a superb tenoning machine.
Get a quarter-sheet of 3/4" ply and make up an auxiliary table for your saw--make it so that it's about a third as wide left-to-right as the regular table and has a skirt that fits down into the rip-fence slot to hold it in place--you can run that piece up above the aux table to form a second fence or you can attach a second fence to the aux table further forward if you prefer. (Note that my fingers seem to be typing "auxiliary fence" tonight when I mean to type "auxiliary table"--I think I fixed all the places I did it by I may have missed some).
Once you've got that cut the shoulders with the blade vertical--use a stop (and make sure that it's solidly retained--use at least two clamps to hold it, otherwise when you tap it with one of the work pieces it's going to move) so that they're all the same distance from the end and if you can't get them the exact right depth then undercut a little.
WARNING WARNING WARNING In the following operation the blade will be exposed--be very careful--making up an auxiliary guard would be a very good idea--a piece of plexiglass bolted to the regular guard or attached to the fence on the aux table will do the job nicely.
After you have the shoulders cut, turn the blade horizontal and put the auxiliary table in place and then you can cut the tenons out using the regular cross-cut motion of the saw. The reason you use auxiliary table is to raise the blade enough for the guard and the retaining nut to clear the table. Cut a little oversized then sneak up on the correct dimension--remember that one full turn of the height adjustment is only a fraction of an inch--move in half or quarter turns and you can achieve quite remarkable control.
You end up with nice neat tenons as clean as your saw blade is able to cut--with a good blade that's pretty darned clean.
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