 how I cut tenons on a large, heavy, cumbersome workpiece. Oh la, Woodworkers, Paul Carlson here, a small workshop guy. I've got a bench top in progress for my samurai carpenter workbench. So here's like a half of the bench top, and then this is going to be an apron for that bench top. This is upside down. I'm going to use my router to cut a tenon on the inside edge of this board. And so it's going to be one and a quarter inch tenon first all the way through. And then I'm going to cut fingers out of it to fit through these separate mortises. And then those are going to be split with wedges and anchored in there and then shaved off. So that's my project here, this big, heavy workpiece. Normally my preference when doing tenons is to use my dado stack on my table saw. But when I've got something this long and this heavy, it extends beyond my table saw and even with my large cross cut sled, I have trouble supporting it. So doing it on my table saw, my preferred method went out the window. And so I go to my equally preferred method which is using my large boss router. This is model MR23 EVS with a half inch collet so I can fit in very large router bits. I have mounted on here what's called the Samurai Carpenter router jig, which is this plastic base. And what that does is it gives me a lot of stability around my cut. Whereas if I just used the regular base, I would end up tipping off of my cut and this provides extra stability. Got a one inch router bit with a half inch collet and a powerful enough router to handle that. Normally when you're going to do a large workpiece like this, you're not just working on one, you usually have another one that's exactly the same width. That is very useful as a brace for your router base. Without that I might come out over the end here and then tip down and cause a problem. I like to keep this router level so I like to have a second workpiece to secure it with on the outside. I want to have a limit on how far my router goes here to the right into the workpiece because I only want the router to come up to this line. Now I want the distance between this line and a line at the other end to be very precise. So I don't like to go over it. Obviously that would be a little hard to put the wood back. But also if you leave it too short then you get involved with a lot of chiseling. So I like to go ahead and try to creep up to that line with all of my setup so that I can use the router to cut it precisely because I find it cuts much nicer than my hand chiseling. Now make sure you're unplugged. Last thing you want to be doing is grabbing over this router bit while you accidentally press an on button or something. So I'm going to get that over where my line is. I've got my good prescription glasses on. I rotate that bit so that I can see at the outside of its cycle that it's not going to go over the line. Sometimes you go to line it up and you don't have the outer edge of the bit down there. I even have a little bit of trouble with my eyesight so I keep a nice handy flashlight always available right on my tool wall. Check to see that this is square across here. It is worth the extra minute or whatever it takes to make sure you're getting this right because if you don't and you don't have any other adjustment abilities then it could be problematic. So my one last thing, I'm all supported. I've got the stop block. I'm ready to go. I just need to set my or my stop bar so that I don't go beyond this line. So I'm going to take my plunger router, release the stop thing, punch it all the way down, get a really good look at my depth. I've got the dust collection accessory on my router and so I can get that shop back on there. I want to get it so it doesn't restrict my movement. So nice and loose. The thing I like about this router is there is no on-off switch. There's only a pressure switch so I can't accidentally have it on and engaged when I plug it in. So I like that. You're always going to be concerned when you're coming across here and you reach the edge of getting some blowout. To protect against that, what you want to do is break the fibers along the edge. And so what I need to do here is get a nice straight cut. I remember I want to be a little bit inside of that line so I'm setting up inside of that line. A little light pole to get it started. See how I'm inside of my line? That whole exercise there was to avoid a tear-out. You need to do something to deal with tear-out. Although with Maple, it certainly doesn't seem to be as much of a problem as when you're using like red oak. But Maple, I love working with Maple for that purpose. So I got that taken care of. I got my line set. I got my stop block. I got all this stuff. Let's get my safety gear on. It's router bits and working over and over and over again. One inch. And that works much faster and seems to have more control. So I got a nice square and a quarter inch tenon here. In this particular case, I've drilled using my benchtop mortiser to the relief hole so that I can now work on cutting out the fingers. I could have done this in other ways. There's always multiple ways to skin the cat. If you have a large resaw blade on your bandsaw, there's nothing that would keep you from pushing this across the blade on the bandsaw and cutting this nice straight line as long as your blade's not traveling. And then also you could go with the bandsaw this way. And if all you have is a saw, hand saw, there's nothing that says with enough time and effort that you couldn't just cut a nice straight line across, you know, for the depth that you need on the cheek. And then turn that again with enough time and effort. I could cut this and cut out this waist area just with a hand saw. So there are other ways to do it. I'm working on another video for tricks, tips, and techniques of getting these triple split tenons or wedge tenons to fit very, very tightly in my mortises. And so look for that. So the bottom line here is that one of my preferred methods of cutting a large cannon in a heavy cumbersome workpiece is to use my plunge router with all of the stabilization and all of the stop blocks as demonstrated. I hope you find that helpful. I would appreciate it if you could give me a like, maybe even a comment and a share. That would be very much appreciated. If you haven't subscribed, be sure you do that as well. Small Workshop Guy, signing off.