Aurora Nightstand - Making the Legs

The order of construction given in Darrell's article made sense to me, so I started by using one of the jigs I had made earlier to make the waterfall profile on all four legs. As suggested in the article, I first used the jig to mark the profile on each leg so I could remove most of the waste using a bandsaw. Then I used a long flush trim bit to rout the exact profile.


Having never worked with African mahogany before, I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I hit it with the router. It behaved quite nicely, though. The routed surfaces were nice and smooth, and I didn't get any burning or tearout at all.

With the waterfall profiles established, I trimmed the legs to their final length, then began cutting the mortises that will eventually receive tenons on the aprons, drawer rails, and stretchers. I have never cut mortises with a router before, and I didn't want to learn how by making mistakes on this project. So I cut them by hand, using the drill and chisel method. I marked all the mortise locations using a knife (rather than a pencil), both for precision, and also to create a little groove to guide the initial chisel cuts. I then hogged out most of the waste material by drilling a series of closely-spaced holes in each mortise location, and finally cleaned up the mortise walls with bench chisels.


The mortises are all 3/8" wide. I used a 9/32" bit to drill out the waste. Next time I think I will drill slightly smaller holes, since it seemed easier to make the mortise walls vertical in places where there happened to be a little more material left to be removed with the chisel. I adjusted the width of each mortise to make it fit a 3/8" thick surrogate tenon made of mesquite.