Beginning some casement windows

The beginnings of a window are simple - blocks of wood cut to the right dimensions. It all begins on a table saw with ripping them to length. Then we take the rips to the chop saw and cut them to length.

I suppose different people do this in different ways, but you have to connect the pieces somehow, and I choose a mortise and tenon approach. An old school way of doing things, power tools speed the process up a bit.

A tenon is a tongue of sorts fashioned on the end of piece of wood. A mortise is a hole the tenon fits into. In the old days a tenon might be cut with a hand saw and a mortise with a chisel. I've done both. Nowadays people use power tools such as a table saw to cut the tenons and a router to cut the mortises (also spelled "mortices").

I devised a special box for cutting mortises in the different window pieces. It consists of two trays to lay the pieces in and my router slides in tracks along the top. Dividers fastened at various places limit the router's travel and allow me to cut precision holes in exactly the same place in every place every time. It also allows me to get set up and let someone else do it (the apprentice) while I move on to other parts of the project.

The tenons have a jig of their own. I cut these on the table saw with a dado blade 3/4" wide by passing the ends over the blade, first on one side, then flipping it over to the opposite side, the blade shallow enough, of course, to not go all the way through the wood. What's left is a little tongue that, properly dialed in, should fit into the mortise with just the slightest of pressure.

I can't remember who told me or where I read it, but someone explaining how a tenon should fit into a mortise said that if you have to force it in with a hammer, its too tight. If it drops right in, its too loose. But if you can knock it in with your hat, its just right.

So we mortise all our pieces , tenon all our other pieces, making sure they all fit. Then we router the correct profiles onto the wood and glue them together. Sounds easy eh?