First Seat Frame Is Glued

I managed to get the first seat joined and glued last night. I opted to try and do mortise and tenon joints. I was a bit reluctant to do this because I’m not much of a craftsman but the other options were much more appetizing. I thought a simple lap joint might not be as nice and I didn’t want monkey around with holes and dowels. The dowels would be a good way to go if I had a drill press (mmmm, drill press). Anyways, I sucked it up, bought a 1/4" chisel, put my dado blade on the table saw and went for it. I sharpened the chisel with my Norton water stones and I must say that I got what I paid for when I bought the $10 chisel from Rona. The blade couldn’t hold a good edge very well at all. No worries though, it still works.

First I practiced and did a test mortise on some scrap wood. Using the width of the chisel as the width of the mortise, I then set the height on the dado blade to make a matching tenon. It only took a few minutes to cut the four tenons. It took around 2 hours to cut all four mortises and epoxy it all together. My work wasn’t perfect but I hope that after sanding the joints will look good. One change for the next seat is that I should put a layer of epoxy on the tenon before coating it with thickened epoxy for gluing (white microfibres as the thickener).

Having never used mortise and tenons before, I’m not sure how “right” my joints were. The tenons slid in easily but I don’t think there was any slop, especially after the seat frame is assembled.