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After you cut your tenons, lay them directly on your work and use the edges like a ruler to mark where the mortise should start and end
Now use your tenons to lay out the locations of your mortises. See the photo at right for how this works. Clamp a piece of scrap to your drill press to act as a fence and chain-drill the mortises in the legs. Make your mortises about 1/16″ deeper than your tenons are long. This will give you a little space for any excess glue.
Once you’ve got your mortises drilled, use a mortise chisel to square the round corners. Make sure your tenons fit, then dry-fit your base. Label each joint so you can reassemble the bench later.
Bed Bolts
There’s a bit of a trick to joining the front rails to the legs. Workbenches, you see, are subject to a lot of racking back and forth. A plain old mortise-and-tenon joint just won’t hack it. So we bolt it. First study the diagram at left to see how these joints work. Now here’s the best way to make them.
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