Ming Inspiration (18)

Rolling along with post 18 in this build thread about a Ming-inspired dining table. Ming inspiration with 21st century perspiration.

What we have today my friends are a whole bunch of pictures about the process I have been engaged in for the past two days. That process, working to complete the profiling on the outer table aprons, could be summarized as follows: rout, plane, scrape, plane, scrape, plane…. you get the idea I’m sure. Did I mention that a fair amount of planing and scraping has occupied me recently?

First though I made up a simple jig to tilt the router at a slight angle to remove a portion of the waste and define the bead:

Then I was getting a little chisel-happy with a Funahiro 36mm paring chisel, which inexplicably became my scraper. Its edge went a good long while, longer than my fingers could hold out anyhow:

Then the chisel work could really begin in earnest:

More:

And then it was time to go to town with the recently-made 60˚ plane:

As expected, pulling a 70mm plane is physically demanding after, oh, 5 minutes, and I was glad once in a while to switch around and put the Lie Neilsen scraping plane to use, on loan from John Z. upstairs, allowing me to work some other muscles:

It’s not a bad little plane at all, albeit with a skinnier blade in relation to what I’m used to.

Here’s one of the long rails at the 90% mark:

Another view shows the bead a bit more starkly – the surface down to the bead needs a few more planing passes yet:

Here’s a close up of the profile – the bead itself is not quite shaped to final form, as I have to make a custom card scraper for that step, a step which can wait for just a while yet:

My Lee Valley Shoulder plane got a workout too, and though I was apprehensive about getting some tear-out with its relative low blade bedding angle, it did okay:

This was a great tool for cleaning the face immediately adjacent to the bead:

If I had gotten some tear out with the shoulder plane, I would have steepened the bevel angle up, but that turned out to be unnecessary.

More planing:

And more chiseling – here I’m shaping the area where the bead jogs up:

The second rail is to the 90% mark in the profiling olympiad:

Once the 4 aprons were profiled to the target, I then cut the 4 aprons to final length, plus a hair. Then it was time to remove that material on the back sides of the sticks which I had drilled out a couple of weeks back. The slow-moving approach and gradual work I have done to remove material in a balanced fashion from the sticks appears to have paid off as the sticks remain dead straight.

To remove the remainder of the material on the backside, to a 3/4″ depth, I elected to rout:

The longer rails however had like an acre of material to remove, so I pulled the groover out of it’s wooden box and got it fired up:

That did the trick, though chips are spread far and wide and all over my bandsaw:

That leaves me with only about 0.1″ of material on deck to remove with the router. That’s tomorrow’s first task on the list, and then I will move towards getting friendly with the corner joints themselves, which, as I mentioned in an earlier post, represent a fairly unique solution to joining the aprons and corner leg with a 3-way miter. Stay tuned.

Thanks for coming by the Carpentry Way today. –> on to post 19