I have a hollow chisel mortiser and the bits that came with it don’t produce clean mortises. I’ve tried sharpening the bits and honing the hollow mortising bits. Is there a good brand of hollow mortiser bits I should be looking at?
Thanks…Gregg in PA
Edited 4/27/2009 10:42 pm ET by x041340
Replies
Gregg,
These work for me.
OK, somebody would have mentioned em anyway.
Regards,
Bob @ Kidderville Acres
A Woodworkers mind should be the sharpest tool in the shop!
Bob,
I have a really dumb question.
Can a hollow chisel mortising bit be used in a drill press or must it be used in a mortising machine?
ASK
You could, in principle, use the drill bit by itself in a drill press, but there's not much point to that. You can't use the mortise chisel in an ordinary drill press because there's no way to attach it to the quill without it spinning. And a spinning square chisel does not make a square hole...
There are attachments for some drill presses that allow you to do mortising (the poor man's mortiser). I've never known anyone who has had good things to say about them, though.
-Steve
Thank you, one more piece of very useful information.
Guess I'll go back to my old methods.
ASK
I'll second what you're saying about drill press mortising attachments. My drill press came with the setup (Jet) for mortising. It's a piece of junk, and I gave up on it 15 years ago. It pops out of the quill, the bits fall out, and it doesn't stay in position well. After all that, the mortising bits that came with it are junk, as well.
Jeff
Jeff,
Although my mortising attachment is probably only about 8 years old, it works fine on my drill press. Used it quite a bit until I got a Powermatic benchtop mortiser. It works great.
Alan - planesaw
Alan
You must have gotten one of the rare good ones. Most that I've spoken with have had similar experiences to mine.
Keep on keepin' on....
Jeff
Steve,
Huh, guess ye can't put a square peg in a round hole after all.
You said it to a tee, thanks.
Regards,Bob @ Kidderville Acres
A Woodworkers mind should be the sharpest tool in the shop!
S,
My experience in trying to get a mortising attachment for the drillpress to work was as frustrating as most folk's. However, I came to believe that the problem was really the drillpress, which is not engineered to apply those sort of forces required by a mortising chisel & bit.
A drillpress not only lacks the long lever of the mortiser but also it's overall rigidity. It doesn't take much force to cause the drillpress table, column and head to misalign - not much but enough to cause the mortising chisel to jam.
Also, mortising attachments tends to come with cheap chisel & bits; these would be problematic even in the best mortising machine.
Ray Pine once posted that his drillpress mortising attachment worked fine. I believe it is because his drill press is a very solid old Craftsman, which is beefy enough to not distort when mortising forces are applied to it. Perhaps Ray also has decent chisels; or has fettled cheaper ones to within an inch of their life. :-)
Personally I prefer a router to make the mortises - fast, accurate and easy to set up, using a universal machne that does a hundred other tasks besides boring a square hole.
But then again I am taken with that top-of-the-range Powermatic drillpress, sold as a Jet in the UK. Perhaps it will perform well with a good quality mortising chisel? I think we should commission FWW to do one of their (in)famous comparison tests with drill presses and mortise chisel attachments.
Lataxe.
"Personally I prefer a router to make the mortises - fast, accurate and easy to set up, using a universal machine that does a hundred other tasks besides boring a square hole".
That is interesting David, I have many routers and never have used one for mortising .
I do prefer a dedicated mortiser , A drill press would not work in the same context as a dedicated mortiser with an x and y axis table { similar to the rat } as well as a good clamping system with table stops and fence stops.
I must have received a good set of chisels with my machine many years ago, they hold an edge well and and get much use.
You are correct in saying that it only bores a square hole, I love to sit in front of it and bore those square holes as the machine barely makes a sound { unlike those whiny routers} Most of the time I have many to do so as the process can become mundane the ability to hear music and be with my thoughts offsets this .
As for the quality of the hole, for me it is much like that produced by a chisel in the hand of an expert {not Me} this I prefer as opposed to a router cut , just my preference.
Tom.
Edited 4/30/2009 8:07 am ET by gofigure57
Tom,
Being a machine-junky I might have a mortising machine, were there room in the shed and I was replete with cash (which, as you know generally gets sucked over to New Zealand). Any mortiser I bought would be a-one of those beefsters with a 6-foot arm and the capability to handle 1" chisels. :-)
***
The woodrat introduced me to router mortising, which goes very well in that machine/jig. The woodrat allows climb-cuts as well as precise shaping of the workpiece (tenons as well as mortises) so makes piston-fitters. However, there is the need to either square rounded holes with a chisel or round square ended tenons with a chisel, so it's not the purfek solution. Angled, haunched and other more complex M&T shapes can also be easily and accurately made, though.
I also now make simple mortises with a large Dewalt 625 plunge router having two opposing fences mounted on extra-long bars. The workpiece goes in the Veritas twin screw vise (which has 2.5" wide jaw-tops) sticking up so the router fences may be used to grip each side of the workpiece to accurately position the bit. (The fences have micro-adjusters on them).
The fence-bottoms ride on the Veritas vise jaw-tops. With the router attached to a dust-sucker and using an upcut spiral bit, this makes accurately sized and located mortises reet quick-like and very cleanly.
One may also clamp on end-stops to limit fore-aft travel and hence the mortise hole-length; but I tend to cut by eye to knife marks defining the mortise hole. A quick change to the router fence positions, using the micro-adjusters, also allows wider-than-the-bit mortises to be made accurately.
***
Just lately there has been a great deal of mortise chisel work in the shed. I have to confess that whopping such a thang with a big mallet is not my idea of fun - after the first four at least.
Lataxe
Edited 4/30/2009 12:09 pm ET by Lataxe
Hi Steve,
I'm satisfied with the job that my old Craftsman drill press and mortising attachment does. I know I'm in the minority here in this.
Maybe I don't know any better, (don't think this is the case, as I've used friends' dedicated benchtop mortisers, and even commercial, albeit old mortising machines
Maybe I got lucky with my drill press/attachment combo.
Maybe I am satisfied to work to/around tolerances that are unacceptable to others.
Ray
It wasn't the end result that turned me off those attachments, it was the hassles attached to the attachment of the attachments. Not every brand fitted every model drill press -- I tried 2 before one fit the quill, and it fit tightly only after some filework. Some drill presses didn't have enough travel to accommodate any model. The hardest part was lining up the attachment. Delta provided a metal rod for this purpose, others didn't. It was a fiddly process which might have been justified if you could have left the setup permanently in place, but that meant losing the drill press for other tasks, so you had to set the damned thing up over and over again. I don't use the benchtop mortiser for months on end, but my BP doesn't go up every time I see it.
Cheers, Jim
Jim,
I agree it is a chore to switch over from mortiser to drill. It takes me a few minutes to do so. Mine stays in mortising mode nearly all the time, I find I have more need of mortises than perfectly vertical holes, so I normally do my drilling "by random" as the fellow used to say.
Ray
ask was askin...
Can a hollow chisel mortising bit be used in a drill press or must it be used in a mortising machine?
Well that's what they was designed for, but they is after all chisels. amd they can be hit with a hammer.
So although the answer to part one of you question is that a mortising bit can be used in a drill press, the answer to part to is that it isn't necessar to use it in a morticing machine.
I was faced with the puzzle of cutting 1/2" mortices for balusters on a stair railing project on site, and could not find an electrical device to do it, nor could my limited skills in adapting a 1/2" drill to a morticing attachment fit the bill, until I hit on the epiphany, you drill the hole, and then hammer the mortice bit into it..
Worked quite well, although I did have to hone the flats after every hole ( the edges flared out- cheap steel etc), but it worked.
The hammered end ain't gonna fit anything anymore, caused it mushroomed ( cheap steel etc),but it worked.
After all, it is just a chisel.
Eric in Calgary
There was a review in Woodworking a while back. The Lee Valley chisels that Bob mentions were the top performers, but they're relatively expensive. The chisels from WoodCraft and Hartville Tool weren't quite as good, but only 1/3 the price.
-Steve
Thank for the tip. I looked at the price and they seem fairly priced if they indeed are premium quality.
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