Weekend Essentials: Mortise and Tenons

Weekend Class, For Beginners

Spring 2025
June 7-8

In this weekend class, you will learn how to quickly and efficiently layout, cut, and fit mortise and tenon joinery using only hand tools. We will show you time-tested techniques to create wedged, drawbored, and haunched mortise and tenon joints. This course is part of our Weekend Essentials series but may be taken separately.

This weekend course will be a deep dive into this essential joint and the use of hand tools to create mortise and tenon joinery effectively. 

We also use this class to introduce you to specialty joinery planes: the router, shoulder, and rabbet planes. These planes shine when it comes to tuning the fit of mortise and tenon joinery. Since mortise and tenon joinery is key to frame and panel joinery, we introduce you to the plow plane as well.

By the end of the weekend, we think you will be convinced that not only are these joints doable by hand, but hand work can offer a faster approach when doing a one-off piece of furniture. In any case, you will not need a dust mask, earplugs, or a hardhat during the course of this class!

Through practice and demonstrations, we will cover the following techniques in this class:

• Laying out of mortise and tenon joinery

• Cutting mortises with mortise chisels, drills, and bench chisels

• Cutting tenons with tenon and carcass saws

• Tuning / fitting mortise and tenon joints with joinery planes

• Making wedged through tenons

• Draw boring and making trunnels to mechanically lock and tighten mortise and tenon joints

• Making haunched joints

• Making angled through tenons

• Sharpening and tuning chisels and planes will be touched on but not a focus of this course. 

Tools

We provide all the tools you will need to successfully complete this course, but we recommend you bring these if you would like to learn about and grow comfortable with your own tools:

• ¼” Mortise chisel 

• Bench chisels

• Wooden flat-faced mallet. Check Lee Valley or Tools for Working Wood

• Any of the joinery planes: plow plane, shoulder plane, rabbet plane, or router plane

Prerequisites

It is recommended that students have some understanding of basic chisel or plane sharpening. Our Weekend Essentials: Hand planes and Weekend Essentials: Hand Saws are good preparation for this course, but are not a requirement. To see more courses in this series, click here.

Class Information and Registration

Class runs from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm Saturday and Sunday in Building 315 at Fort Worden. Map
Please read our What to Expect page for general information about the school.
Please also read our Registration Policy.
Sign up for the waitlist if the course is full.

Class size: 12
Cost: $385
Materials Charge: $40