Welcome to Woodworker++

This blog is intended to be a journal of my progress as a woodworker. Grab a drink, maybe some popcorn, sit back and enjoy a glimpse into my woodworking projects, both failed and successful. Why should you care what I do, or what I have to say? You shouldn't, but just maybe I can keep you from making the same mistakes that I had to learn the hard way.

Friday, February 15, 2008

No updates this weekend...

Wifey and I are out of town this weekend. So there probably won't be any cabinet updates for this weekend. There is, however, a Woodcraft store and a bunch of lumber yards in Nashville. Oh, yeah.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Legs...

In earlier posts you saw the legs were quite wide. At first I was
going to make them 1 3/4" x 2 1/2" x 36". Then I got to looking at them and that was just ugly. So, I decided to make them smaller & square. They're still 36" long but now they're 1 1/2" inches square. I spent most of the day making these legs. I was able to dimension them fairly quick. Then came time to make the apron. This is my first attempt at mortise and tenon joints. I'm actually quite proud of them. I did the first one entirely by hand with a small backsaw and some chisels. After the first I used the table-saw to cut the tenons, and the drill press to hog out material for the mortises. There's a pic in the list where you can see the comparison between the handcut tenon, on the left, and the tenon cut with the table saw.

I have a tenoning jig for my table-saw. Unfortunately, the cheek cut on the tenon was so small I couldn't use the jig. So I made the tenon the way I've seen Norm and David do it. I nibbled it away a little at a time. I always thought this would take forever, but it's actually very quick. Especially when the alternative is hand cutting the tenon.





















Clamped up!

Glue-up first thing in the morning is awesome. I needed to get to work on the legs for this cabinet and gluing up the carcase was a good way to ease into the day. The clamps went on easy enough. I wish I had larger F-Style clamps, or smaller pipe clamps. 3/4" x3' pipe clamps are heavy. I used Titebond III for gluing up the carcase because I wanted a long open time. I thought I may need the extra time to get the carcase square.