Ted Mcginley Sons Crafting Craftsmanship With Heart In Every Wooden Creation

A Practical Look at Fine Woodworking Joinery for the Home Shop

Ted Mcginley Sons Crafting Craftsmanship With Heart In Every Wooden Creation

I've spent more years than I care to count messing around with joinery in my garage shop. The general philosophy behind what Ted McGinley Sons represents is straightforward: treat every joint like it's going to outlive both you and your furniture. That's not poetry. It's a practical approach to building things that don't wobble after three years of abuse. The core technique they emphasize comes down to a combination of well-cut mortise and tenon joints reinforced with hand-planed surfaces. This isn't about fancy CNC programs or laser-guided setups. It's about layout, patience, and knowing when a 3/32-inch gap actually means something went wrong. Here's how it works in practice. You start by selecting stock that's been properly acclimated. I'm talking months in your shop environment, not weeks. If you pull lumber off the rack and immediately start cutting joints, you're already behind. The wood will move after assembly, and your joints will either open up or bind depending on the season. The mortise and tenon itself requires a bit of attention to detail that most home woodworkers skip. The tenon should have a slight breeze fit - meaning you can feel air escape when you tap it into place. Not loose. Just a whisper of resistance. When I was working through my early projects, I used to cut these a hair tight, and the result was always the same: glued joints that I couldn't disassemble for repair because the friction was too high. The workaround was switching to a hand-cut tenon with a chisel instead of relying on the table saw. It took longer upfront but saved me countless hours of frustration later.

Ted Mcginley Sons Crafting Craftsmanship With Heart In Every Wooden Creation

Glue selection matters more than most people realize. PVA glues like Titebond Original are standard for a reason, but they have a working time that's easily exceeded in colder shops. If you're in a space below sixty degrees Fahrenheit, the glue starts setting faster than you'd expect because the wood temperature drops the adhesive's viscosity. I switch to Titebond III in those conditions, and it buys me an extra eight to ten minutes of open time without sacrificing bond strength. Another thing nobody talks about enough: clamping pressure distribution. Most folks grab a handful of bar clamps and start squeezing until things look right. The problem is uneven pressure can shift the joint slightly while the glue cures, creating a barely noticeable angular deviation that manifests as a wobble months later. My approach is to use cauls - flat pieces of scrap hardwood placed between the clamp jaws and the workpiece. They distribute the force across a wider surface area and keep the joint square. It adds maybe twenty minutes to a project, but it eliminates the guesswork. The sanding sequence is where shortcuts usually creep in. Going from eighty grit straight to one hundred twenty is tempting. It's also a mistake. The larger scratches from the eighty-grit paper won't fully disappear under one hundred twenty, and you'll see them under finish anyway. Work through one hundred fifty before finishing, and do a final wipe with mineral spirits to raise the grain. Let it dry, then a quick pass with two twenty paper removes the raised fibers. The result is a surface that accepts stain or oil evenly without that patchy look that drives people nuts.

Ted Mcginley Sons Crafting Craftsmanship With Heart In Every Wooden Creation

Finishing is where the heart part comes in, if we're being honest about it. Oil finishes like Watco or Danish oil penetrate deeper and highlight the grain structure in a way that polyurethane simply cannot. The tradeoff is durability. An oil-finished table top will show water rings and ring marks from hot dishes within the first year of normal use. Polyurethane is harder but looks plastic-y on open-grain woods like oak and walnut. I usually go with a hybrid approach: initial coats of tung oil to build penetration, followed by a thin wipe of paste wax for surface protection. It's not as tough as a catalyzed lacquer, but it's repairable. Scratch a piece of furniture finished this way? A little more oil and a fresh coat of wax fixes it in under an hour. Polyurethane requires sanding the entire surface to repair anything meaningful. The biggest counter-intuitive insight here is that tighter joints aren't always better joints. There's a common belief that a perfectly snug tenon is the goal. It isn't. A slightly loose tenon with proper glue coverage actually creates a stronger bond because there's more surface area for the adhesive to grip. The trick is controlling that looseness. If the gap exceeds roughly one thirty-second of an inch on a one-inch tenon, you're looking at reduced structural integrity. Stay in the one sixtieth to one fortieth range and you're golden. One scenario where this approach completely falls apart is with softwoods like pine or poplar for structural applications. These woods are too porous and soft to hold fine joints under load. I've seen people attempt mortise and tenon connections in pine dining tables that looked great in the shop and then failed within a year of actual use. For softwoods, dowels or pocket screws with good joinery plates are the practical choice. Don't fight the material. Another limitation worth noting: this method requires a decent collection of hand tools. A good set of chisels, a quality marking gauge, a try square, and a couple of hand planes. If you're starting from zero, the investment is real. A solid bench chisel set runs about two hundred dollars minimum, and a decent smoothing plane is another hundred to hundred and fifty. The alternative is investing heavily in table saw jigs and dado stacks, which gets you close results faster but lacks the same precision at the joint interface. If you want to learn more about the specific techniques and philosophy, searching for Ted McGinley Sons Crafting Craftsmanship With Heart In Every Wooden Creation will lead you to resources that go deeper into their approach. Their published materials cover layout strategies and tool maintenance that aren't obvious from watching YouTube tutorials alone.

Ted Mcginley Sons Crafting Craftsmanship With Heart In Every Wooden Creation

The reality of this craftsmanship approach is that it's slow. A single bookshelf using proper joinery and hand-fitting takes me about twelve to fifteen hours from rough cut to final finish. A comparable piece built with pocket screws and glue-up might take four hours. The difference shows up in how the piece ages. Pocket-screw furniture tends to develop squeaks and loosening joints within five to seven years. Properly joined pieces often get tighter with age as the wood settles into the joints. It's a matter of deciding what you value more: time now or longevity later. I stopped trying to optimize for speed around twenty years ago. My current projects are built to be handed down, not replaced. That mindset shift changed everything about how I approach the work.