How to Make Mortises with a Hollow Chisel Mortiser - A Free Video from the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship

A mortise is simply a hole in a piece of wood designed to connect with a tenon. The mortise and tenon is one of the most used joinery types in woodworking. As with anything in woodworking there are different ways of accomplishing the same task. The same can be said for making a mortise. Mortises can be made with hand tools, power tools, or several combinations of the two.

How to Make Mortises with a Hollow Chisel Mortiser with Tim Rousseau

In this video, Tim Rousseau, an instructor at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, demonstrates how to cut Half-Blind Dovetails. As with through dovetails, accuracy is everything.

In this video, Tim Rousseau, an instructor at the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship, demonstrates how to cut a mortise on a hallow chisel benchtop mortiser. A hallow chisel mortiser is a machine that's found in many small woodworking shops. The way this machine cuts a mortise is by using hallow chisels bits. The chisel has an augur that runs through the center. The body is hallow and allows for the wood chips to come up through the chisel.

There are advantage and disadvantages to having a machine that will cut a square mortise. One advantage is not having to chisel the ends like you would on a regular horizontal chiseling machine or a router.

The disadvantage is that going through woods like Oak and Maple can be a bare especially when using smaller benchtop machines. Your chisels should be high quality and sharp and you need to be mindful of your feed and plunge.

Using a hallow chiseler won’t give you the cleanest looking mortise, there will be some chisel marks left on the walls whereas a router or horizontal mortising machine will leave a much cleaner mortise.

Check out the video above for a step by step walk through of how to set up and make a mortise using a hallow chisel mortiser.