Have a commission to build, involving M&T...

[jussi]

I made a dog crate for my sister a few years back. I didn't go with slats from top to bottom. Rather I put a panel on the bottom half and then went 1-1/4" dowels the rest of the way. I turned the dowels myself and only had a mini lathe so I was limited to the length. If I had a full sized lathe I may have gone the full length dowels.

[dbhost]

Well stock prep is underway. I have some nice WIDE walnut boards, 8+" wide that I want to use in a side x side glueup, but there were some minor cracks / voids and a nasty loose knot I had to mix up a mess of epoxy mixed with some walnut sawdust as a filler for... They are now in the shop, drying from the void filler and will likely start being prepped tomorrow.

Since these are so much wider than my jointer, I have a 13" flattening sled built for my planer. I will flatten them that way, then remove them from the sled, flip them over, and make them parallel, all to the same thickness, and proceed from there dimensioning them...

I might just gobble up most if not all of my walnut on this project. Ugh...

[capncarl]

Now that you have the slats cut, how about using a wider board to cut your tennons and after you are satisfied with outcome, rip it the the desired width. That would reduce your number of set ups.
capncarl

[dbhost]

Still processing the lumber to thickness. No slats cut quite yet... I will get there though...

[BadeMillsap]

DB ... if you are doing "real" M/T as a learning experience or because you are a purist then power to you! If on the other hand you are going for the "look" of M/T I will share that my experience has led me to use a bit of woodworker trickery to accomplish the look without the complexity.

I will refer you to the Mission Style Queen sized bed I built a few years ago as you can see in this link to the web album => Queen Bed Album

For that project I built a simple jig that allowed me to cut dado's in a wide board like a big box joint where the dado's and the spaces between them were exactly the size of the slats ... then I ripped the board to the exact width of a dado I had cut in the edges of the top and bottom boards that would receive the slats. I glued these ripped pieces down into the edge dados and that provided correctly spaced correctly sized "faux mortices" that allowed the slats to seat nicely giving the illusion of traditional M/T with much less stress.

This jig worked because the slats and the spaces between were the same size but I suspect with a little thought a similar jig could be fashioned if that were not the case.

Again ... "real" M/T is a beautiful thing, gives strength to the joinery and is well worth learning ... but ... it isn't necessarily the "only way" to accomplish the visual effect.

Just my 2 cents ...

[JimD]

I've made coffee and end tables the way Bade describes. It is much faster and easier than mortise and tenon and looks about the same. It's also pretty strong. On the tables I made the insert/spacer piece sticks up a bit instead of fitting flush. So it doesn't look exactly like a mortise and tenon. I think making them flush would be harder.

On the other hand, mortises are pretty fast with either a plunge router and jig or a hollow chisel mortiser. Short tenons with a dado blade trimmed with a shoulder plane take more time but are still not terribly time consuming. Depends on how much time you want to spend and what you like to do.