I’m working on replacing my porch furniture, and the side table was the worst of the lot so it got replaced first.
I’ve built a few little tables by now and I’ve got a lot of the process down. I used this one as an excuse to practice making actual mortise and tenon joints instead of the loose tenons I’ve used in the past. The mortises that the center brace sits in were chiseled by hand, the others are routed.
I’m thinking of making a couple outdoor-friendly morris chairs to replace those old iron ones. That’ll be a minute though.
The only photo in progress I have is this the top and the legs glued up in the clamps. I should have taken some shots of it at various stages.
I will share here my journey with mortise and tenons, for this project is a rematch. The two end tables I posted about a year ago were designed with mortise and tenons, and I tried to cut them on my table saw with a dado stack. I’ve seen others do it that way but I struggle to control the depth of cut precise enough to make tenons. So I cut the tenons off, routed mortises in the end grain of the boards and used floating tenons. Saved the project.
On the kitty approved porch table I built this spring, I designed the aprons with floating tenons to begin with since I had a method for doing that I was comfortable with. That table got breadboard ends, because I didn’t want the captive panel’s movement to rack the legs. I did one of the tongues on the table saw keeping the tongue intentionally too thick and then rasping/planing/filing/sanding/chiseling/chewing/eroding it to proper thickness. Then I tried using a router, and it worked like a charm.
The plant stand I built uses end-of-board-in-mortise joints (The legs splay outward in 5 degrees to form a narrow pyramid, and the legs are very subtly tapered. FahahUCK trying to lay out the shoulder cuts for those tenons) which necessitated squaring the corners of the routed mortises with a chisel. So I got some practice with my bench chisels. I’ll admit posting that project here was a little bit of validation seeking; I took fairly flattering photos of it. Because there aren’t tenon shoulders on the aprons and rails you can see every apprentice mark on the mortises, and the patch on the leg where I plugged the mortise that I cut in the wrong damn face of the leg…the curse of the craftsman fell thick and fast on that one, I made it, I see every single flaw, and I don’t think I could see it as a piece of nice furniture if it wasn’t for this community’s kind words.
And having seen a couple videos on Wood By Wright’s channel about cutting mortises and tenons by hand, I gave that a try in some scrap, and it worked like a hot damn first try. So I felt bold enough to build this little table. And while it isn’t flawless I’m genuinely proud of this one. When I set the top on it I had one of those “look how far I’ve come” moments. Those first end tables took me nearly a month to build, basically all of November. This project went from rough sawn lumber to dry varnish in 4 days.
You want to tackle a mortise and tenon project? Great, go build it and come back here and show us. I’m looking forward to seeing what you build.