 There's a right way and a wrong way to cut wedges for your wedge tenons. Hola woodworkers, Paul Carlson here, small workshop guy. When it comes to doing wedge tenons and spiking them with your wedges, there's a wrong way to cut them and I experienced that. So what I did was I ended up cutting my wedges cross grain and that's wrong. Now the right way to do it is to go down grain, in other words have your grain running from the tip to the end of your wedge. And so it's running lengthwise here. My son and I were gluing together my samurai carpenter workbench and we got to the point where everything was glued and clamped and on really tight and then we were going to drive the wedges into our split tenons. Well, because I had cut them the wrong way, they basically shattered. In other words, they wouldn't drive in far enough. They would just simply break along the grain. And so we were not able to, as you can see, take this bottom one here, big gap here because this has been cut off. But I had a wider wedge here that I couldn't drive down in because it kept breaking off. So I just decided to forget about it and I would do some sort of repair. Let me see if I can demonstrate that. So here's the wedge that's cross grain. Let's give her a little, so it breaks right on the grain. This will break as well, but I don't think if there's, if you don't, if you've got the cut. Oh, it damaged my little temporary workbench. If you've got the cut down there and then it's got some place to go, then I don't think it'll break. Now, having screwed up my workbench, I'm going to tell you what I'm going to do to fix it. So here's an example of how bad it is. I could try to drive a chisel in there and then get a new wedge piece and try to drive that in and close that out. And that might work, but I've got a gap on this side as well. I've got a gap over here. So I don't like those. So what I'm doing is I'm going to take a Forstner bit and I'm going to drill out some waste area in each of these. And then I'm going to take my chisels and I'm going to chisel a nice rectangular hole, you know, about three quarters or half an inch deep. I'm going to create a long bar of this design where I've got the maple, walnut, maple, walnut, maple. And I'm going to have it be slightly bigger than that hole. This wouldn't be the way it is. This is one that I cut off. I'm going to have one that's oversized in all dimensions. Then I'm going to slowly sand it down and pare it down until it fits just perfectly. And then I'm going to glue that puppy in there. And that's the way I'm going to repair my problem. And the idea here is to still have the strength, but make it look like you didn't screw up. One of the biggest advantages of subscribing to the Small Workshop Guys channel is I'll make more mistakes than your average content creator. And as a result of my mistakes, I'll figure out what I did wrong and I'll share with my audience how I fixed it. So that's what good carpentry is or good woodworking is fixing your mistakes so that nobody knows there happened. Now, if you don't want anybody to know that you're making mistakes, then don't be a content provider because you'll be tempted to share your mistakes with everybody. Here's where I am in the process. I have cleaned all these out with the Forstner bits and chisels and got them as square as I could and lined up. And they're larger now than they were before, but that's okay. And then I've laminated a bar of my piece that's going to go in there to make it look like it's a spiked tenon. Now it's all secured in there. It's all spiked. It's very stable. I've got quite a long tenon. So I'm not worried about the joint failing. So this is just going to be cosmetic. Now I cut it purposely oversized so that I could then get on the sander and just bring it down a little bit at a time, a little bit at a time until I finally get it to fit into that mortise just perfectly. And then I'm going to have it stick out a little bit and glue it in there. And then when the glue has set up, I'm going to cut it off. Since this is a lifetime bench and I don't like the little small cracks, I'm actually going to do all 12. One, two, three, four, five, six, and then six on the other side. I'm going to do all 12 of them the same way. So it's going to take a little bit of work. I didn't plan on it, but when you cut your wedges the wrong way, that's what you have to do. You've got to get in the penalty box and pay the price. I've moved my belt sander over here where it's convenient. I hooked up to the shop vac and away we go. So I've got it fitting nice and tight in there. What I'm going to now do is just go to the bandsaw and cut it off roughly a little half inch or so beyond that. And then glue it up and pound it in there nice and thick and then let it set up and then cut it off. And if you enjoy watching me make mistake after mistake and disclosing those to those of you who might make the same mistake down the road, then keep me on YouTube and you can only do that by helping me out with sharing my videos and giving me some comments. Small workshop guy, siding off.