As previous posted I'm in the process of building my daughter a mission sofa
table. To start, mortise & tenons look a lot easier when Norm does it.
Anyway the side rails use through mortises, #1 mistake I used the
measurement from the plans to mark the legs and rails with a pencil (bad
idea) the up and down part of the mortises are longer then the tennon. After
glueup I made little patches to stick in the lower part of the mortise. # 2
this follows Norms advice of measure twice cut ones. I glued up one table
end two legs upper and lower short rails and vertical slats, so far so good.
went to glue up the other table end and checked to see where the long (front
back rails) mortise was (their offset mortises) and after the glue setup and
took the clamps off I realized that the offset is to the outside on one
table end and to the inside to the other table end. At this point I said a
few bad words as I was kicking myself. What I did to fix it was to cut the
tenon off one end of the rails and make new ones on the oposite side. During
a trial assembly it didn't look to bad and was less then a 1/16 off from
outside of legs to rails. # 3 I blew I think was $59. on the woodcraft
tenoning jig and after using it for
several of the tenons it worked ok I guess but kinda tedious. When I had to
recut the tenons today I already had the stacked dado set in the tablesaw
and just used it with a sacrificial fence and for me it did a much faster
and better job of the tenons then the jig. (won't tell swmbo that).
Well enough rambling, hope everyone had a great weekend.

--
Mike S.

http://members.tripod.com/n0yii/woodworking.htm