Reply To: Cherry side table progress, advice welcomed
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Legs, Part II
After ripping the legs, a couple of pieces curved a bit along their length from the release of stresses in the wood. I let them sit for several days and thankfully it didn’t change after the initial movement. I was really glad I cut them a bit oversized, and the taper gave me some leeway in getting rid of the bend on the worst offender, so I ended up tapering them all before laying out the mortises.
Mortise and Tenons
Armed with this knowledge and a 3/16″ pig sticker mortise chisel I got from Jim Bode’s site, I set about mortising. I really liked using the mortising chisel, and it saved the edge of my bevel edge chisels from getting banged up. It went pretty well overall and a few of them are really crisp. I also picked up a little depth gauge from an antique store recently that has an angle adjustment as well. I set this to the angle of my bevel gauge used that to check angled ends in the mortises, and was quite pleased with results.
The design I worked out has 12 angled mortise and tenon joints, 8 with mitered ends for the top rails, and 4 for the lower rails. I learned several valuable lessons from the bench stool project:
a) the tenons would take me a lot longer to do than I might guess
b) check the angles constantly (and verify your bevel gauge against the drawing!)
c) don’t fiddle too much with the shoulder lines, it’s a slippery slope!
d) whatever you take off the upper rails has to come off the lower rails
Overall, cutting the tenons went about how I expected – it was fiddly and took a while, but I just did one or two each night after work for about a week. A few of them required corrections, and then corrections to those corrections to get them where I wanted them. One or two were just right with just a quick paring from a chisel after sawing. The second to last fit in its tenon so well it made a pop gun noise when I separated them. That was pretty satisfying.
One issue I have is that my tenons tend to get bruised or compressed during all the test fitting and taking apart again, and aren’t quite as snug by the time I’m done. For my bench stool I added drawbore pins and that snugged everything right up, but the ones in this project are too small for that. I think I’ve read the moisture in glue can also cause the fibers to expand again, so maybe it will correct itself? Anyway, it felt reasonably solid when I had the whole leg frame together for the last test fit.