Making a Mortise and Tenon / Vertical Router Jig

[Paul Montgomery]

I made this jig initially to accurately route the mortise & tenons that join a guitar neck to the body. But I have other uses for it too. These kinds of cuts can't be done with a hand held router or a router table because the router/work piece would be too tippy, inaccurate, and unsafe.

There turned out to be a lot more to making accurate cuts than I thought and it took quite a while for me to work through those problems, so if anyone wants to make and use this jig, I think the video will be very useful to them.

I wanted to include a lot more information in this video but in the interest of keeping things short, I decided to save that for another video. Templates, the heart of this system by making accuracy possible, could easily fill another video.

I'm also interested in ideas about further possibilities using this routing jig, so leave comments here or on YouTube.

and Thanks.

https://youtu.be/gyanlg9sIjU

[Darrel Friesen]

Nice jig. I made a similar jig for dovetailing when I first started out. I bought the original O'Brien neck jig when it was two pieces, one for the body and one for the neck. I see that it's now evolved to be a one piece unit. The thing I like a lot about it, other than it wasn't too expensive 8 or 9 years ago when I bought it, is that you use the guitar body in combination with the aluminum angle on the jig to set the neck angle to match your bridge height. It was a very worthwhile purchase and saved a lot of time that I could use for building guitars.

[Paul Montgomery]

I probably would have gone with O'Brien jig but I wanted this for some other projects besides guitars.

[Thomas Beltran]

Hello Paul - Not only is your jig nice, but your video was excellent - very well done. Thank you. I bought the StewMac templates years ago, but i have not used them yet - could not personally get used to the idea of the neck being attached instead of the integral neck. The templates are very heavy and well made. Also, one can easily make copies of the template with a router and bearing, so the template itself is not damaged.

[Paul Montgomery]

Already having the templates, you have a good reason to build the jig. I am going to attempt to make templates out of lexan I think.

[Jim Ritter]

Nice jig and well done on the video. I like that you can adapt it to other purposes. Even though I made a jig for dovetail joints I might make one like yours for ‘ other purposes ‘.

Jim

[Paul Montgomery]

I also have a few other jigs that I made that might be of use. One is a jig that I use on my hand belt sander that can sand down wood to the thickness of veneer. Of course you can't do wide stuff like a guitar top, but it's good for narrow pieces.