Mortice Pain….

Hi Bob. How unfortunate. You do have my sympathy. I, and lots of us, have had similar problems. Before any advice, which you can take or leave of course, a question: did you practice your mortises before actually trying them on a project? Cutting mortises, dovetails, or sawing to a line, are skills that need to be acquired by practice. I sawed, chopped, etc., over and over and over and over to learn basic cutting and chopping etc. skills before using those skills on any but the easiest projects. And I still practice some more if I have not used those skills for a while. This is no different from anything else. Skills require practice to acquire and to maintain.

1. Darren is right that you can sometimes salvage skewed mortise holes. I have, on more than one occasion, simply widened the mortise hole a bit by drawing new lines and paring to them. This can work if you are only a bit off, but not if you have to widen the mortise so much as to weaken the joint. I have never tried gluing a wooden plug in as Darren suggests, but maybe that can work. Oh, if you have already cut the tenons to size, and then widened the mortise holes, you can easily glue a bit of wood to the tenons. That is easy.

2. For the future, you might try Paul’s mortise guides to keep things straight. Those can work like a charm. Or you can simply cut the mortise holes without a guide but a bit narrow, and then use a guide board, clamped to your leg, to help pare the hole to the line. I often do that.

3. Yes a slightly skewed chisel can mess up your mortise since the skewed chisel will have a tendency to twist in your hand as you chop. It sort of pivots on that higher point. You can control it by clutching the chisel tight, but better not to have it skewed.

4. As to sharpening, that is another skill. You can simply use a guide as Darren suggests. Veritas makes a very good, though expensive one. Lots of folk like those inexpensive side clamp jobs, which also work well if you are trying to put a bit of a crown on a plane blade. Sharpening by hand, however, is quicker and sort of fun. Yah, I used up a lot of steel sharpening badly, and then reshaping a seriously skewed edge on a grinder and then sharpening badly again, and then reshaping the edge again, and on and on. I am a slow learner! But at some point I no longer had to reshape. Kind of like most other skills — suddenly you realize you are doing it right, sorta like magic.

5. If you are using water stones, you should avoid much pressure on the push because you can hurt your stone. If you are using diamond stones, you can apply pressure on both the push and the pull. Pressure on the push actually helps break off the wire from the tip. The exception for me is on narrow chisels. They can go crooked very fast and I find just pulling is the best way to go. But all this is a matter of personal preference. If applying pressure on just the pull (or the push) keeps your chisel straight, do it.

6. You get a skew in your chisel because you are applying uneven pressure to the blade. Do your blades tend to skew in one direction? I very predictably tend to apply too much pressure on the left so I very self consciously apply a bit more to the right. If you are like me, and you predictably put too much pressure on one side, you can correct yourself.

7. How you angle the chisel on the stone can make a difference with respect to pressure. Like a lot of folk, I tend to hold the blade at an angle. However, especially with very narrow chisels, I am more likely to get a skew when I angle the blade. With very narrow chisels, I hold the blade straight and only put pressure on the pull stroke. There is no rule here. It is just how my hands seem to work.

6. If you are going to get a skewed blade from hand sharpening, it is most likely to happen on your course stones. So take just a few strokes on those stone and check the edge. If you are going off, you can easily see it where the course stone abrades the chisel. Just add another stroke or two with more pressure on the other side to even out the abrasions.

7. If the skew is not too bad, you can easily straighten it out by adding more pressure to the longer side. If it is very skewed, this can take a while, and you might want to regrind, though that is not really necessary. If you are just paring and not chopping mortises, a bit of skew is not such a problem (and sometimes the skew is helpful) and you can straighten the blade out over several sharpenings. But sure to check your blades before each sharpening to see whether there is a bit of a skew that needs to be worked on.

Good luck!

Paul is a master craftsman… He makes everything look easy! 😀 The first time I tried a hand tool after watching him I began to appreciate just how skilled he is. Good luck and keep at it!