Acornhouseworkshop

The veneer glue ups dried, and I drilled through the veneer into the mortise cavity. A few minutes with the router and chisels, and the through mortises are done.

I cut the shoulders for the tenons on the table saw and then took them over to the band saw to cut the cheeks. That worked well, but, I cut them a little oversized, since the through tenons need to be finessed to fit perfectly. I should have cut them a little bit closer to the finished dimensions. Trying to cut just a little more on the band saw doesn’t work well, since, without much meat on both sides of the blade, it wants to move towards the edge, leaving an uneven cut. Which meant a lot of handwork with the shoulder planes and chisels. It took me about one hour per tenon on the first rail. 

I decided to try the table saw tenoning jig. I had decided against it at first, because of the size (and weight) of the rails. However, with the aid of an extra clamp, it worked fine on the second rail, speeding up the process considerably. Since the tenons were about 4″ long, the saw blade didn’t reach all of the way, but a 1/2″ strip is a lot easier to plane down.

So the through tenons are done, only needing a little fine tuning of the shoulders (see pics below. The front one has the pattern for the final shape.). I milled the upper end rails and will get to the (non-through) mortises and tenons tomorrow.

This entry was posted on May 20, 2009 at 7:11 pm and is filed under Acorn House. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.