Chiseling a mortise into end grain

I’m not real clear on how you accomplished this. Any chisel will split the long grain; so, mallet whacks would accelerate that. If your cutting out the rectangular pocket for the cards, then perhaps your chisel was a bit dull and “grabbed” too much wood, allowing force to split the body. I find that hand tools are harder to use unless I’ve got the wood firmly held in place by a vise. Are you using adequate clamping?

I don’t really have a bench + vise and I clamp with an arrangement of hand clamps to an old desk which is my temporary bench. It’s quite possible my clamping was not adequate.

Don’t mind the additional damage on the far end as I was doing some more experimenting after the piece was ruined. As you can see, the split happened just in front of the chisel.

Your holes are to small and don’t remove enough material. Try drilling with a larger drill bit to remove the bulk of the material and then clean up with the chisel. You shouldn’t need to pare away much material to clean up the outline of the mortise.

-- I don't make mistakes, I have great learning lessons, Greg

I think I kept the holes smaller as I was afraid of drifting out of plumb and into the wood I wanted to keep. Lesson learned for next time. Good thing this was more or less a practice run (with the idea of giving it away if it turned out well) before I make a really nice one out of some rosewood I have.

I would drill out most of it like Greg suggested, then just clean up the rest with the chisel, but I would also do all that while it is still part of a longer board, then cut away the piece you need after you have it mortised. I think it will hold together better that way.

-- Dale Manning, Carthage, NY

Something that I might do, along with what these other guys suggested, would be to take a couple of blocks of wood and clamp them around the end you are mortising so that as you are chiseling it will be more solid and have less ability to split.

-- If I could just get this whole "Time/Money" problem figured out...

Small, small bites with the chisel too. End grain is tougher to work.