Woodworking without pain (2)

Well since getting through the routed mortices in the last post I've been slowly cutting the rails to length and cutting each tenon to fit one, and only one mortice.

I had originally intended to have each pair of rails attached to a leg go right through the leg and cut a halved notch out of each where they cross inside the leg and I cut the mortices on four sides of the legs with that in mind. After cutting the first pair of tenons and unit testing (trial fitting) I came to the conclusion that this provided a weak point on the end of the tenons so I gave up on that idea and just cut the tenons back to go 2/3 of the way through the mortice in the leg. The bad news about that is that leaves the outer ends of the mortices as holes but what I intend to do with those is to cut short stubs from the end of some spare rail timber and glue them in place to look like the tenons come right through - oh the devious cunning of it.

Anyway, I have now completed all of the mortices and their matching tenons so the time came for an integration test.

This shot shows the rails laid out together as they will
be fitted to the legs.

The two longer rails each have one slightly longer tenon as a differentiator for identification. (Bullsh*t - I indavertently cut one too long so I cut the other one to match ;-)

This shows the junction between an end rail (left) and a front/back rail.

The cutback (on top in the photo but will be on the bottom) is to provide an overlap with the bottom of the mortice so that I didn't have to be finicky about making them too pretty.

With the rails laid out I was able to carefully fit the morticed legs over them to show its final assembled form - albeit upside down.

The final assembled form of the legs and rails.

The show above makes the base look more square than it really is. The final finished surface will be about 1200 x 900mm. Note that the legs are not yet cut to length - thats the next job. The leg height has to be such that our cast iron outdoor chairs can fit underneath the rails so that will make the table surface about 720mm or thereabouts.

One final challenge I am expecting will be whether the table is actually stable enough with the rails fitted at the top of the legs. Unfortunately I won't know this until it is all glued and pegged. However, if needs be I can fit some strengthening blocks in the corners between the bottom of each rail and the leg it is attached to (and even across the inside of the corner from one rail to another) but I don't want to do that unless I have to. I don't anticipate that the table will be moved very often - it will probably require a team of circus strongmen.