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A mortiser or morticer is a specialized woodworking machine used to cut square or rectangular holes in a piece of lumber (timber), such as a mortise in a mortise and tenon joint.
The first square chisel lever mortisers were purely manual and relied on the operator pulling down on a large lever to push the chisel through the timber. An improvement was to place a rotating cylindrical auger inside a hollow chisel. This helps to clear chips up the centre of the chisel. As electric power became easily available, the auger developed as a drill bit and became the main means of removing waste timber from the mortise. These mortisers now used much shorter hand levers, as the manual work was only in cleaning up the mortise to be square-cornered.
Square chisel mortising bits can also be fitted to normal drill presses using a mortising attachment.
The Greenlee Company still manufactures mortisers, as do a large number of other power tool manufacturers. It is a common tool in the woodshop of professional , but because of its specialized nature, many amateur woodworkers would not make enough use of it to justify the moderately high cost and space this tool takes up in the woodshop. Some smaller and less expensive models, suitable for cutting only narrow mortises are available.
Other tools such as a Wood router could be used for the task, but the router usually requires special attachments, jigs or templates and the router bit leaves rounded corners that might need to be squared by hand with a chisel. Alternatively, the tenon can be rounded with a rasp to achieve an equally strong joint.
For cutting small mortises, a normal drill bit can be used. However, for larger mortises, a common type of bit in modern mortisers is a Harry Watt square drill bit, in which a bit with a Reuleaux triangle cross section is allowed to "wobble" while it rotates within a square with rounded corners. This type of bit removes all but the corners of the material to be removed, leaving very little to be cut by the chisel.
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