The 28th post in the series. Another long day, though the first 4 or 5 pictures are overflow from yesterday’s work.
Here’s we I left off yesterday, with the four legs now diminished about 0.25″ on two faces:
The next step was to deck down the end grain to the height of one of the stub tenons:
An hour or three later, the leg joint is starting to get closer, but there are still a lot of steps to go:
The pencil lines you can see define the outline of the two stub tenons. One of those stub tenons is shorter than the other, an idea I took from one of the classic Chinese 3-way miter connection I examined and blogged about earlier in this series. The handsaw as usual proves to be the straightforward way to trim one of the tenons:
A while later, these leg joinery is starting to look more complete:
Another view which shows the staggered tenons heights a little better:
Why are tenon heights staggered? It’s not just for amusement, but it involves making each tenon as long as it can possibly be, and the amount of room is different in the mortises between the short aprons and the long ones.
Onward I march. I reconfigured the same jig once again to do another routing operation:
Followed by a bunch of chisel work to clean out the waste and produce a square inner corner on the folded sword tip miter:
Then I defined the mechi (stub tenons, or tongues) along the sword tip miters. Last, I chiseled down the interior face of the folded sword tip right at the end:
Completion of that chopping and paring work brought me to this result:
Here are all four legs now complete through that stage of cut out – for fun I placed them in a different pattern than before:
Another view:
The posts are still not done of course, but the majority of cut out on the upper joint is complete. I still have to cut them to length and shape them. Then they get beaded like the lower edge of the apron. and there is a bit of joinery going on at the lower end of those ‘+’shaped slots in the tops of the posts.
Thanks for coming by today. Another post will follow tomorrow, so please stay tuned. Comments always welcome. For moe, see post 29
hello,
really appreciate the blog and the great info that you provide.
i notice that your joints are sometimes “wet” in some of the photos. i was wondering what it was and the reason for doing it.
cheers,
michael (in nanaimo)
Hi Michael,
thanks for the question. The 'wet' areas you notice are the result of having used a bit of camellia oil on those locations to aid in the chopping and paring work. Camellia oil, or 'tsubaki abura', is a light bodied oil which largely evaporates in a day or two, and doesn't interfere with the oil based finishes I use. I also use it while planing sometimes, especially in finish planing.
~Chris
OMG!!!!!
That's an incredibly impressive display of joinery work. I can imagine with no difficulty why you might feel stressed.
Thanks!
~C