I've just spend the better part of an hour watching the youtube videos
of Matthias Wandel's tenoning, slot mortising and box joint jigs. I
think you can drill down from this site to get to the videos:
http://woodgears.ca/joinery.html.

To say that these are nifty, IMHO, is an understatement. Any of you
folks taken it upon yourselves to build one or more of these? If so,
what's your take on the level of effort? Any tips ... known gotchas and
the like?

TIA

Larry

TDDriver wrote:
I've just spend the better part of an hour watching the youtube videos
of Matthias Wandel's tenoning, slot mortising and box joint jigs. I
think you can drill down from this site to get to the videos:
http://woodgears.ca/joinery.html.

To say that these are nifty, IMHO, is an understatement. Any of you
folks taken it upon yourselves to build one or more of these? If so,
what's your take on the level of effort? Any tips ... known gotchas and
the like?

Neat stuff!

Level of effort looks reasonable. Tips? Take your time and build
carefully (re-build, if necessary, until it comes out right).

I like the way he thinks.

--
Morris Dovey
DeSoto Solar
DeSoto, Iowa USA
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto/

Making a hole in the side of a piece of wood is easy.

Making a hole, or a mortise in the side of a piece of
wide - a specific size - and at a specific location - not
so easy.

Pay particular attention to the left/right stops and how
easy or difficult they are to set at specific locations.
For the tenons, you've got left/right AND depth of cut
to worry about - and set and control.

I suspect that he used 1/4" spacers for his multiple
tenons into multiple mortises.

What he doesn't show in the video is how he sets up
for cutting the mortises and tenons.

The problem with all these jigs is the set up and testing
time for each joint.

Think about it. Let's take table legs and aprons. Unless
the mortises are all centered on the leg, you need two
set ups per leg. And to cut the second mortise, you have
to lose the set up for the first mortise. Now if the stops
were retractable - you'd them up once for the two leg
mortises and be done with it. Haven't seen that feature
on any of these jigs, shop built or store bought.

Which is why I use the DOMINO - which does have retractable
stops and everything is symetric horizontally.

my 2 cents.

But he does have an elegant design ; )

John wrote:
snip


Wow! That's some pretty neat stuff. I have a similar jig for doing
finger joints, only it's made for a router, and uses numbered
spacers. It works pretty well, but I'm sure the geared approach is
more accurate. Does anyone know if you can buy gears like that? (It
seems to me it would take way to much time to make the gears on my
own..).

John

You might email the author and see if he'll sell some.

I don't know that it would take a lot of time however. I've been looking
at his plans and mulling them over. He already provides a gear cutting
template, which would serve well. And from what I see, he cuts the gears
out on a bandsaw, which looks pretty straightforward.

I, too, have a jig for boxjoints on the router, but this guy's design
looks so lovely that I'd be happy to trade that jig for his.

Tanus