Woodworking without pain (3)

Well things have progressed a bit further - even if quite slowly (somewhat similar progress to Gibbs' boat in NCIS). The legs are cut to length and I now have the rough finishing of the legs and rails done. They have been smoothed and rough sanded. I also used a 10mm round-over bit in the router to do the sides and bottoms of the legs, and a smaller one to do the lower edges of the rails. This picture shows the test assembled framework right-side up for the first time.


Don't worry about the legs appearing a bit off skew in the picture as its only held together by the friction in the mortice and tenon joints at this stage - they will be straight when glued and doweled.

The picture also clearly shows the empty outer mortices resulting from my design change. Currently I am making some short stub rails to make it look as though the rails do go all the way through. I have currently made 3 - the 4th's tenon is done and it just needs to be cut from the stock - which will leave 4 more to do. Then they will all need rough-finishing, rounding over etc before I do the permanent assembly.

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.

Woodworking without pain (1)

I started a project to build a new outside table based on some laminated Yellow Box kitchen benchtops rescued from my mate Jase's kitchen renovation. Of course the table tob is useless without the infrastructure to support it so I went out and bought some 100 x 100 mm Black Butt (lovely wood and hard as b*****y) for the legs and some 100 x 50mm Black Butt for the rails. That was the easy bit - now I have to construct the thing!

The first thing I had to do was 'dress' the timber as it was rough-sawn. Fortunately I have a Towa electric plane and that made the job a bit easier although incredibly noisy and produced huge quantities of small wood shavings and dust. The garden is getting the benefit of those.

I had decided to place the horizontal rails at the top of the legs - each corner being a cross-over, halved mortice and tenon from two directions. This would give me the strength I needed and also allow the horizontal rails to be at such a height as to allow our outdoor chairs to be slid underneath. The first task was (is - it isn't finished yet) to cut out the mortices for the ends of the rails to lock into. Every good job starts with marking out so that one follows the principle of measure/mark twice (or more) and cut once. So here is a pic of one of the legs with the mortices marked out ready to be cut.

(Double-click to view larger)

As you can see this is my 'workshop' - two saw-horses outside the back of the garage. I had first of all thought to cut them by hand using a tenon saw for the long vertical cuts from the top of the legs and then chisel to remove the bits between the saw cuts. It could be done but would take several months of Sundays so I stopped and gave it some thought as to how to do it easier. The first thing that I tried was making multiple holes drilled by a spade bit in a drill press and then chiselling out the dross. This worked but was again quite slow. This pic shows the result of that effort - still have to do final chisel adjustments made at this stage.

(Double-click to enlarge)

The long cuts could easily made on a bandsaw but would require one with a deep enough throat to allow 100 mm timber to pass. That would be an expensive (but oh so nice) addition to the workshop. Then I though about using a router and, knowing that Jase has a router, I thought that I would give that a go. So - I contacted Jase and asked to borrow his router to test the theory. Since I hadn't used a router before it took a little getting used to and time to set up etc. Anyway, having proved the process on my second attempt I decided to get my own router.
I can use the router on other projects and there will be a lot of edge rounding still to do on this project after the structural work is done.

I had to buy a longer bit to take out the middle portion of the dross but I have now sorted out the process and can get through it relatively quickly with minimal stops for adjustment. I was initially taking advice I had read online and elsewhere - make all cuts at one depth before going deeper. That is probably OK for some projects but not for this one. Adjusting the parallel fence is what takes the time - particularly as my new router has a quick step-progression depth gauge adjuster - so I make all the cuts necessary to reach the required depth in one location before adjusting the fence to make the next parallel series of cuts. This picture shows one cut already down to the required depth.



Note my 'backstop' to stop the router at the end of the desired cut length. Also note the 100 x 50mm rails clamped to the sides of the leg to provide support for the router past the end of the legs.

And here is a pic with the next cut made about halfway down to the required depth.


This is one of the legs with cuts made from two sides to the full depth of the shorter bit.


Once all of the cuts have been made on all four sides it will be time to mount the longer bit and take out the middle section. After that the joints can be cleaned up by chisel and then they will be ready to measure individually for the tenons on each of the rails.


Question: Why not use the longer router bit to make all of the cuts?
Answer: Because the longer bit protrudes from the bottom of the router in the fully 'up' position and the initial cut depth would be too much. The general guide for depth of cut seems to be about 3.2mm per step.

One more thing. There was a potential to make a mess of this and have to start again so I have not yet cut the legs to their final finished length. There is enough to spare on each leg to do the whole thing over again if necessary.

Next episode: Finishing the mortices, cutting the tenons, and putting the infrastructure together.