Today I made a mock up for an upcoming project. It's a tenon & mortise joint for a knee brace. I'll be building a new patio roof in a couple weeks and I wanted to practice this before I risked damaging good lumber. This went pretty well but this old crap lumber I had laying around gave me some trouble because it's not square or dimensionally correct.
Here's the tenon. It's a piece of old weathered poplar. It carves pretty nice but the piece isn't square.
I started the mortise pocket in a scrap of 4x12 Doug Fir. I hogged out a bunch of material with a 1-1/4" spade bit and a cordless drill. I'm not being a slave to hand tools on this project. I go back and forth between hand and power tools based on what I feel like doing.
Some nice mortising chisels and a small slick. The crude little mallet is made from a piece of London Plane, chosen for its toughness. I have a bunch of fast & dirty mallets/mauls around.
Here the mortise pocket is taking shape. The lines drawn across the pocket labeled 45 & 90 were to help me place my drill. The double line in the middle had 90° and 45° bore holes starting right next to each other and immediately crossing each other. I drilled tiny pilot holes for each that I could follow after my spade bit bore for the first hole wiped out my layout for the second. I used my DeWalt cordless leaf blower to clean out the pocket as I worked. That worked great!
Here's the finished mortise pocket.
Next I'm making some pegs for my joints. I'm using some black locust that I've air dried for 3 years. Black locust is a great choice for pegs because it's hard, gritty (grippy) and highly rot resistant. It was the preferred peg material for colonial timber framers. I have an 8" long piece of a 7-1/2" round. I'm slabbing it with a froe. The maul on the stump is an piece of Doug Fir. It's not a very good maul. I carved it green 5 years ago for a single use project. But it hasn't died yet so I still use it.
I split the slab into peg blanks. I got a dozen blanks out of this round. I need 8 for my project plus one for this mock up.
I roughed out the peg with a Pexto drawknife. I use my drawknife bevel side down, super sharp and pull it skewed to slice rather than split. I've found I'm best able to manage grain changes this way. I finished the peg by draw filing with the smooth side of a farriers rasp. This cleaned them up real fast. Later I bought material at the hardware store to make a peg jig. I'll see how that goes. I may come back to this method.
One last shot of my mock up.