For the tenons on the aprons and the stretchers, I started by defining the shoulders using a regular blade on the table saw. I considered using a dado stack to do the shoulders and the cheeks in one step, but decided against it because I was too lazy to set up the dado blades. Also, I wanted to use my crosscut sled for these cuts, so that meant using a regular blade.
After cutting the tenon shoulders, I removed most of the waste with the bandsaw, then cleaned up the tenon cheeks with a horizontally mounted router.
Since the mortises were cut by hand, I couldn't count on them all being exactly the same width. So I intentionally made the tenons a little big and then trimmed them individually to fit the mortises using a block plane and a chisel. In the end, one of the joints was just a little loose. All the others went together by hand without pounding or clamping, but were tight enough to stay together by friction. I guess that's what you want.
Here's a picture of the dry fit. Suddenly it looks a lot more like a table than a pile of random parts. Gotta start wondering about the big color difference between the legs and the other parts.
3 comments:
Russ, I wouldn't worry too much about the contrast from the legs to the rest of the piece. They'll probably catch up and at least ALL the legs are the same hue, at this point.
Vic, by "catch up", are you saying that you think the lighter parts will darken over time and eventually take on a color closer to the darker legs? It is true that I milled the legs a couple of weeks ago, and the lighter parts more recently.
I think it will still look good even if there is a variance in color. If 3 legs were dark and 1 light, no, but they are all the same. I think Vic means they are all in the same color realm in that the legs, if you could lighten them on a color wheel, would be like the aprons. Unlike, say, Holly being 'lighter', but not the same hue. Or not. :)
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