Free Plan: Mission Hall Tree
One post, four arms, eight braces — a 1912 entryway piece you can finish in a weekend.
Free download. No signup required.
- Full PDF plan
- Cut list & dimensions
- 14 steps with mortise layout
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The plan is yours. Here is the part it does not cover.
The hall tree plan is yours to keep — cut list, dimensions, mortise layout, all fourteen steps. What it does not teach is the layout habit behind it: working every mark off one reference face instead of off the last part you fitted. That is technique, and technique is a different book.
Download didn't start? Get the plan here.The habits the plan assumes you already have
Woodworking Secrets covers the technique layer plans leave out — layout, cutting, joinery and finishing as skills rather than as project steps. Low-cost physical book.
Show me Woodworking Secrets →Disclosure: I may earn a commission if you buy through this link. It doesn't cost you extra.
The entryway is the first thing anybody sees, and in most houses it is the last thing anybody builds for. This one takes a weekend.
The plan comes from Mission Furniture, How To Make It, Part 3, published by Popular Mechanics in 1912 and long out of copyright. It is one main post fifty-nine inches tall, four short cross posts, eight braces and four arms, all joined with mortise and tenon. Metal hooks go on last. The beveled tops are the detail that makes the piece read as furniture rather than as a coat rack.
It is the simplest construction in the whole Mission hall set, which is exactly why the layout matters more than the joinery. Every joint in the piece lands on that one post. Mark all of them before you cut any of them, working from one end and one reference face, and the piece comes out true. Mark them one at a time off the last fitted part and every small error stacks upward — by the top arm it is visible, on a piece that is nothing but vertical lines.
Project at a Glance
- Difficulty
- Beginner to intermediate
- Main materials
- Quarter-sawn oak, four metal hooks, glue, finish
- Build time
- One weekend
- Tools needed
- Chisels and mallet (or a pocket-hole jig), miter saw, square, four clamps, sandpaper
- Joinery
- Mortise and tenon throughout
- Safety
- Tall, narrow and top-loaded — see the note below before you stand it up
- Source
- Popular Mechanics Handbooks, 1912 (public domain)
Before you cut:
Lay the main post on the bench and mark every mortise in one session, all of them measured from the same end and squared off the same face. It feels slower and it is not. A spacing that is wrong on a pencil line costs you an eraser; the same error found after four joints are chopped costs you the post. Bevel all four post tops while the parts are still loose and small — the identical cut on a standing five-foot assembly is a different job entirely.
The layout rule in that tip is not really about hall trees. It is about working from a reference instead of from the last part you touched, and it shows up in every case side, every leg set, every row of shelf pins you will ever mark out.
That kind of thing rarely appears in a plan. Plans give you dimensions and an order of operations, because that is what a plan is for. The habits that decide whether the dimensions actually come out right sit one layer below, and most people assemble them slowly, one ruined workpiece at a time.
Recommended Next Step
The layer underneath the plan
Woodworking Secrets is aimed at that layer — the technique and sequencing side that plans assume you already have. Layout, cutting, joinery and finishing, treated as skills rather than as steps in a specific project.
It is a low-cost physical book, which makes it an easy way to find out whether that kind of material is useful to you before committing to anything bigger.
Woodworking Secrets
A technique-first woodworking book covering layout, cutting, joinery and finishing.
Disclosure: I may earn a commission if you buy through this link. It doesn't cost you extra.
One weekend, and it greets everybody who walks in
Grab the plan, cut the post first, and mark it all out before the chisel comes off the shelf.