Wearing Warned Me

I wrote about my tenon troubles in a previous post.  At the time it was way too cold to work in the outside shop.  Procrastination provided me an opportunity to cheat--I waited long enough for the weather to break.  I used a dado stack to cut the tenons.  Yea, yea, I know I should have bought or made a tenoning jig, but I didn't have the time or money to do so.  Instead, I cut the tenons extra thick with the thought of cleaning them up with a rabbet plane.  Robert Wearing in The Essential Woodworker clearly advises that sawing well up to, but not across, a line is the correct way to do a tenon cheek.  But my name is not Robert Wearing and clearly I don't saw well.  Actually, I'm OK with the state of my sawing skill; my marking skills and tools are still in question, though.

My current problem is in removing the waste between the two tenons on each board in my loft bed project.  I misplaced my coping saw so I decided to resort to a method for removing waste demonstrated by Frank Klausz.  Frank demonstrated this technique as part of cutting dovetails, not tenons.  I should have listened to Frank.

The waste Frank dealt with was narrow, and easily worked with a sharp chisel.  The waste I tackled was 3/8" thick and nearly two inches long.  Basically the technique is to chip half way through the waste with a chisel, flip the board over, and chip through the remaining waste.  This keeps the shoulder pristine and protects the bench top from a mistake with the chisel.  It works great with the narrow bits Frank worked with but...well, I'll just show you what it produced for me:

With masters like Wearing and Klausz at my disposal, you might be questioning my seeming choices to "go agin 'em".  My excuse is simply that woodworking is about working with wood, not watching wood be worked.  I have to try everything seen or thought of in order to find what works best for me.  I'm built very differently than Frank Klausz, so what works for him may be silly for me.  Now I know that Frank is dead on right, and Robert is mostly right for me.

I found my hack saw, but now the coping saw is missing.  I don't think I fed the dryer enough socks so satisfy my cosmic lost stuff quota.