 This is part one of a three-part series talking about doing triple through wedged tenon. This is an example of my mortises, three of them, that's why we call it triple, through because tenons are going to come all the way through and then they're going to get spread with wedges and hopefully will be super super tight on these walls and the wedging will secure it and get it tight going the other direction. Part one here is about cutting the mortises. To do that I wanted to use my plunge router with a straight bit. I have a half inch bit and a three-quarter inch bushing and the idea is to create a template. I have 12 of these to do. I want them to be precise and using a template is the best way to do that. Instead of using my ruler and trying to lay everything out and mark lines. So I want to create a precise template and that eliminates all the need for marking up. The template will tell me both how far in from the edge of the workpiece. I need to be and the template will tell me exactly where the three mortises need to be. The way you build the template is to just take, in my case I'm taking a half inch MDF, I go to my table saw and I just cut strips that are about, I start with a piece that's six or eight inches wide and I just cut pieces according to the plans I'm working off of. When you get those exactly the width that you want them all then you simply glue them together. In my case I use the, just type bond two and I like to get it into my parallel clamps and that way I get more time to push things around and get them exactly where I want them. I did try using the CA glue and things set up too fast on me and sometimes I had to start and build the whole pattern over again or tear it apart and chip away and I don't like that. That some of the tips of creating these templates is make sure you leave yourself plenty of fingers even though this is all I would need then where's my clamps going to go. So leave these pieces such that you've got some place to put clamps to hold it on your workpiece. Because my bushing in my router is three quarters of an inch and my bit is a half of an inch that's a quarter of an inch difference. So that's an eighth of an inch on each side. When you cut these strips you take that into account. In other words if I want this to be three quarters of an inch wide here then I need to add an eighth on each side and there's some other videos I'll put a link to one or two about building these templates. So I need an extra one eighth of an inch on each side. So instead of three quarters here I cut a piece that's one inch and one inch and one inch and then I adjust my center pieces on this one. There's only one side here so one eighth less there. This one there's two sides so that's really one quarter of an inch less. In other words normally this would be one inch but I make it three quarters of an inch. Anyway make a pattern, get it glued up, make sure it's exactly perfect according to the plans you're going off of. Mark which one is going to be oriented on the top of your workpiece because this may not be the same width as your workpieces. Get it perfectly lined up with the edge here. So in this case I wanted this to be a certain distance in so I cut it at an eighth of an inch less than that and the router runs along the edge of the template and you end up cutting your perfect mortises. Now those will be rounded off and so the next thing you need to do is lay down your combination squares and so forth, scribe a line for where your square corners would be and then chisel it to get the corners square. The other things to watch out for is when you're chiseling those round corners it's very common to leave ragged edges in the corners. I like to take little rectangular files and get those off but in some manner you need to get those edges, those corners completely clean. If you think they're clean just take a really good flashlight and look down in there and you'll decide no they're not clean you need to do some more work. So get these all rectangular all the way through both sides squared off. If you use your plunger router you probably can't do anything to get it all the way through. That's pretty difficult if this is going to be three inches or more. So what you do is you do the one side then you take a drill and you drill through the other side large enough hole so that you can insert the bit that you're going to use into that hole and you want to have that bit go down far enough so it can reach the walls that you've did from the other side and then let this pattern bit with the roller on it find those walls and do your second side. Again those would be rounded so then you got to square them off. Just a few words of wisdom these drill bits need to be maintained so look for some good articles about cleaning them and sharpening them. You may want to send them out to be sharpened but you can't just use them use them and use them and not take care of them. If you get a lot of crud and stuff building up on there that's keeping the cutting edge away from your wood then that's not going to work very well. There's some cleaners that are made this is one's made by Trend and it's called a tool cleaner and they even show some router bits as one of the things that get cleaned up and as well as saw blades and so forth. The other thing is to make sure on the bits that you have that have the rollers on them that you keep those lubricated. There's a little lubrication bottles and so you can get that really finely done in there. And I'm going to tell you having experienced it a couple times when you're going through from the opposite side and you're carving out your walls sometimes you'll hope it doesn't happen to you but you suddenly say well that didn't feel right I don't know what's going on what in the world and you pull it out because it went too far and you find out that your roller fell off of your bit so there's no longer anything to stop it at the wall and you're digging into your wall. So it's very important to maintain your rollers you know I have just the right tension with the Allen wrench on the little screw that holds that in make sure it's lubricated make sure the ball bearings in there haven't gotten you know squared off and ruined. I just replaced this one and I just cleaned these using my trend cleaner and I replaced this one because I had had it drop off on me once and as I tested it I just didn't feel like it was had maybe the nice round ball bearings anymore than I wanted so an ounce of prevention certainly worth ten pounds of redoing the workpiece so anyway maintain your cutting tools we'll look forward to seeing you on part two small workshop guy signing off