Saturday, January 6, 2007

Legs and Mortises

Today I completed the legs and cut the mortises for the table. The legs are 1.5 inches square so I had to glue up two pieces of soft maple to obtain the correct thinkness. Everything glued up well except for one leg shown below. This had a seem that was visible so I cut a thin piece off one side and face glued it over the seem. I then planed the edges down even.




Once that was complete, I used the power planer to plane down all four sides of each leg the same thinkness, hand scraped off the planer marks and cut them to length. Here are the legs completed and ready for the mortises.



I then determined which sides of each leg I would want facing out from the table. Once figured out, I marked the mortises with a T&M marking gauge and used my marking knife to cut a line to be used as a guide for my chisel.

Once marked, I made a small jig for drilling out the holes. I used a 1/4 inch forstner bit so I could pare down to the line. Also, I marked a line on the jig of where to start drilling and clamped a stop block. I need to make a drill table at some point that would also be an outfeed table for the band saw but this will suffice for now. Add it to the to do list.



Here are the legs drilled out and ready to be cleaned up with the chisel. This is the first time I have done Mortises. The first one came out ok but I did get much better as I progressed. One tip is to place the chisel on the marked line and when hammering down on the chisel to pry the chisel away from the line. This way you make a nice square mortise without compressing the edge. Overall I think they came out ok for a first time.





Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to complete the lower and upper stretchers and cut the top into a circle. We are getting close to be completed. The mortises took much longer to do than I had anticipated.

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