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.
Showing posts with label apron. Show all posts
Showing posts with label apron. Show all posts

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Shaker table aprons, dry fit, tapered legs...

Quick update on the weekend's progress.  I finished all mortise and tenons for the legs and aprons and conducted a dry fit.  Some of the mortises were a little loose, but I think they'll still work.  In all I am proud of the way the table is coming together so far.
Once I knew everything was looking ok, I decided it was time to taper the legs.  To do that easily I needed to build a tapering jig.  So I did.  I leveraged the idea from The Woodwhisperer's Guild tapering jig video.  The difference is that Marc used a rail to guide his jig, where I just used the fence.  It worked well for me. In all the excitement, I forgot to take a picture of the tapered legs.  Hopefully, I'll have the glue up done soon, and I'll post a pic then.

Saturday, March 1, 2008

Tapered the legs...

I got up early this morning to taper the legs. I wanted to have them kind of curve and taper, but they're a little to small for that. I ended up just going with a straight taper. I tried to make a simple table saw tapering jig, but that was going to turn out to be a bunch of work. So, I did a quick band-saw tuneup and cut the taper. The first cut didn't go as expected. At first I thought I had hit a really hard knot. Turns out the drill press was in the way. Mistake #221. After moving the drill press, the tapers went fairly quick.

Unfortunately, at this point I got pretty into what I was doing and forgot to take pics. Basically, I cleaned up the horrible bandsaw job I did to get the tapers. I used my No. 7 plane and got it down nice and flat, then I took my cabinet scraper and cleaned up the transition. They're by no means perfect, but they'll do.

Once I finished the cleanup, it was time for quick sanding and a glue up. Again, I was on a roll so the only picture of the entire leg & apron glue-up that I have is the one you see here.

While I was letting the glue dry I did a final sanding on the cabinet. I progressed from 100 up to 220 grit and put a 2lb cut of shellac on the cabinet, then set it outside to sun dry. Worked pretty well.