Aurora Nightstand - Gluing Up the Shelf and Top

I guess I've always used sheet goods in the past when I needed a wide board, because other than the tongue and groove panels for these rustic cabinets, I don't ever remember edge gluing a bunch of boards together.  Likewise, I can't say I've ever tried to flatten a board that's wider than my planer.  So making the shelf and the top for the nightstand was a bit of a minor adventure for me.

Gluing up the panels was easy enough.  I had a big thick chunk of particle board that provided a good reference surface for the glue up.  I loosely clamped the boards to the particle board to keep them aligned and flat.  then used a few bar clamps to close up the joints.  That worked great.  Just like in the movies.

Flattening the panels turned out to be more of a good news, bad news story.  To wit:

Good News: I had a shiny new Veritas low-angle jack plane in the drawer that I'm sure I heard calling, "Use me, use me!  I can do it.  I know I can."

Bad News: The very first swipe of the shiny new Veritas low-angle jack plane tore a big chunk out of the edge of the shelf panel.  Actually, I sort of expected this.  The blade that came with the plane is ground at 25 degrees, which is supposed to be more suited for end grain work and well behaved wood.  But this mahogany has all kinds of swirly, interlocked grain that's anything but well behaved.  Hence the nasty tear-out.

Good News: Several days earlier, I had ordered the optional high-angle blades for the shiny new Veritas low-angle jack plane, expecting the blade with the 50 degree bevel, as promised by Veritas, "to eliminate tear-out on even the most difficult grain patterns." So rather than completely destroy the shelf panel, I decided to psotpone the second and subsequent swipes until the new blades arrived.

More Good News: Sure enough, the 50 degree blade did the trick.  After a bit of fiddling around, I had it taking the proverbial wispy shavings from the mahogany, without even a hint of tear-out.  I managed to get one side of the shelf smooth and flat.  The other side is also beautifully smooth, but not nearly as flat as the first.  For this reason, the second side will be known forever hereafter as "the bottom".

Aurora Nightstand - Archery, Part II

Here's a shot of another dry fit, after routing the arches on the bottoms of the aprons, rounding over all the exposed edges, and lots of fussing, fiddling, and sanding.

According to Darrell's article, the next step is to glue up the base. It seems to me, though, that it would be a lot easier to apply the finish before assembly, so I'm going to make the rest of the parts, then finish them, and then put everything together.

I radiused the corners on most of the parts using a roundover bit in the router table. But that wouldn't work on the inside corners of the legs where the waterfall profiles intersect, because there's nothing there for the router bit bearing to ride against. So I had to do that part by hand. To help keep everything uniform, I made this little tool out of a scrap of sheet metal, then formed the roundovers by scraping away at the corners of the legs.

Aurora Nighstand - Oops #1

Oops. I managed to start the bandsaw cut on the wrong side of the line as I was preparing to rout the curve on the bottom of one of the aprons. Fortunately, I recognized my stupidity fairly quickly, and what could have been a big pain in the butt turned out to be just a little setback.

To recover, I used the table saw to trim off the ruined area with a straight cut parallel to the grain. Then I dug through the scrap pile for a matching piece, glued it on, and continued as if nothing had happened.

In the end, crawling insects will point and laugh at the seam (see the green arrow) on the bottom edge of the apron. Those of us with greater stature will not notice the repair.

Aurora Nightstand - Archery, Part I

I'm becoming more and more convinced that it's better to think of the router as a trimming tool than as a machine for hogging away large amounts of wood.  So, whenever possible, I try to somehow cut away as much waste as possible before using the router to do whatever it has to do.  I think this makes the router bits stay sharp longer, and helps to reduce chipping and tearout because the router has less material to remove.

So for each of these arched parts of the Aurora nightstand, I temporarily attached the blank to the template in order to trace an outline of the shape onto the blank.  Then I removed the blank from the template and sawed as close to the outline as I could with the bandsaw.  Then I reattached the blank to the template and routed the final profile in a single pass.

Aurora Nightstand - Cutting Some Tenons

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.

Aurora Nightstand - But First #1

You might think that "but first" has something to do with birthin' babies.  But that's spelled differently.  What we're discussin' here is one of those goofy situations where you want to do A, but first you have to do B, where B doesn't really contribute much to what you're trying to accomplish other than allowing you to do A.  God forbid, of course, that B should have its own "but first" (C), and that C should have its own "but first" (D), and that D should have its <stack overflow>

Reset.

Fortunately, this was only a single-level "but first".  What I wanted to do was cut the mortises for the little square ebony plugs that adorn the legs of the Aurora nightstand.  Eight of them are supposed to be 3/16" on a side, but my smallest chisel was of the 1/4" variety.

A halfhearted search failed to locate a smaller chisel locally, and I didn't want to wait for an internet order.  So I wound up buying a cheapo file at the Harbor Freight store and using a grinder to remove some material at the end that was hiding the chisel within.  I then polished and sharpened it in the finest Scary Sharp tradition.  It worked great for cutting the eight little mortises.  How it would hold up through eighty more, I don't know.

Only one problem:  I don't know whether to hang it up with my files or my chisels.

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.