Mortise and tenon

[furnituremaker]

I would like to add a shopbot to my furniture studio. Aside from the obvious ease of profiling, detailing and carving I wonder are there other furniture makers who are using this tool to make their mortise and tenon joints and dovetails. Having had CNC experience on another shop's much heavier machine creating parts for my dining chairs (using an aggregate head for tenons) I wondered if anyone out there has set up for this type of joinery on a shopbot.

[lstovall]

You might try this thread.
http://www.talkshopbot.com/forum/messages/312/32806.html

[Gary Campbell]

Michael...
There is a fair amount on the M & T's in the link that Marvin posted. Here is a link to my column on dovetails: http://www.shopbottools.com/garysmusings.htm#Dovetail

I just finished the cutting for 14 8-0 x 3-0 by 1 1/2" hard maple doors. The styles and rails had 2.5 by .75 by 1.25 mortise's cut in them (6 per door) all were cut on the Bot. Worked great!
Gary

[kirkkelsey]

Designing furniture and cabinetry for a ShopBot is something we do all the time. Rather than dealing with the problematic conversion of SketchUp designs (Mavin's link), we use the CAD software Alibre Design. It is a true CAD design tool similar to SolidWorks. The best part being that there is a free version that will allow you to create designs with up to 10 parts (and other version upgrades for a reasonable fee). Alibre has made CAD software affordable for the Mechanical designer, which just happens to work quite well for the woodworker.

With a standard 3 axis machine, you will need a jig similar to Gary's that will allow you mill the ends of parts for tenon's, or simply use loose tenon construction. As for the mortises, you will need to use a holding jig for mortises that are at an angle.

We enjoy doing design work for the ShopBot, as the design process is a little more challenging when you try to minimize the number of bits you use, and select joinery that is best suited to single sided milling. However, jigs and fixtures will allow you to mill about anything you want. Once you get into using the ShopBot, you will keep finding more advanced and complicated ways of using the machine to manufacture furniture.

We just finished a design to mill a Knapp Joint in the edge of a drawer. With a jig similar to Gary's to hold the drawer material. The joint is fully parametric, which will allow resizing all the elements of the joint. A DXF is then exported from Alibre and code created in your favorite CNC software (PartWorks, Vectic Vcarve Pro or Aspire, ArtCAM...).

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