Shoe Shelves, Part 2: Mortise and Tenon Notes

I mistakenly wrote in part 1 of this series that each shoe shelf would have 20 m&t joints, plus the small mortises for attaching the top with buttons.  In reality, each shoe shelf will have 24 m&t for the aprons and rails, 8 shallower ones for the shelf boards, and maybe 6 for the buttons.  That's a lot of m&t joints!

I designed this project with aprons and rails being only 1 1/4" wide.  And with shoulders all around the tenons, each mortise will be less than 1" long.  The mortises are also 1" deep.  It can be challenging to chop a mortise with these dimensions without damaging the end rims, so I decided to bore out much of the waste first.  Here is my sequence.

Mortise is a hair over 3/8" wide.  Boring two 5/16" holes, 1" deep.

Marples 5/16" mortising chisel

Chop out the waste between the holes.  A 1/4" bench chisel also helped in the deeper parts.

Square up the ends with the mortise chisel

Use 1/4" bench chisel to score the corners and separate fibers

3/4" chisel directly in the gauge line to pare down the walls

After cleaning out some waste, checking to see that the end wall is vertical.
The adjustable square also acts as depth gauge.

Using a depth gauge to check that the side walls are vertical

Ended up with a nice, clean and square mortise

For the tenons, once the wide shoulders are sawn, most waste is split off

On one side only, the router plane is used to clean the tenon cheek to the gauge line

On the other cheek, the gauge lines are still visible after splitting

Using a 3/4" chisel to get close to the lines, but not all the way to them!
Not using router on this side since the tenon might not be perfectly centered
as different rails might have different thicknesses. (I have only one router
plane and wanted to keep it at one setting.)

At this point I have to say this: I wish I could just pare directly to the lines, but that ALWAYS leads to a loose fit for me.  It would be great if the theoretical would match the practical, but it doesn't always work that way.  The mortise and the tenon are marked out with the same gauge setting, and you'd think you could pare exactly to the lines and get a perfect fit, but ...

Testing the fit in the mortise

After marking the side cheeks from the mortise hole and sawing them,
 testing the fit to see if the joint is self supporting

I've been doing a lot of mortises similarly lately and it is working well for me.  But, man, are there a lot of them to do!  I'm not done yet with all of them for the first shoe shelf.  Then I get to do it all over for the second piece.  Fun, fun, fun ...