Setting up a mortising machine to create mortises can sometimes be tricky. There’s a handful of adjustments that you need to make, and if you have to recreate a setup, it can be difficult getting it back to where it was. My solution is to make a template that acts as a story stick.
Tell me a Story. As you can see in the photo above, the story stick is a piece of thin plywood. I mark the part name and mortise location, length, and depth. Now, I can use the mortise to set not only the workpiece stops, but also the left and right stops for the machine (photo below). The final setting is to set the height the bit. This can quickly be done on the actual workpiece, as you see in the lower right photo, or easily referenced using the store stick set on edge (bottom photo).
The story stick allows me to set the workpiece stops, along with the stops that control the movement of the router.
The final setting is to set the bit height which can quickly be done using the workpiece.
