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ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Heya. Back in the HCH (nee DIY) feedback thread, the mods suggested people make their own project threads for larger projects. So here's mine. I'm making a cabinet for our dining room, which will contain our board games, which are currently on some garbage shelving that I think predates Ikea.

Here's the model of what I'm making:



If you don't know me from the woodworking thread, I only use hand tools for my furniture building. You can see and read about some of my previous projects here. I find hand tool working more fun than power tools, and since I'm doing this as a hobby and not a job, I just do what's more fun. I'm one of those sickos who enjoys physical labor, so for me power tools have a lot of downsides (big, heavy, expensive, dusty, loud, and scary) without many upsides.

Here's my toolchest. Almost everything I use for my projects fits in here.



The most common tools are up top. These are my planes, saws, chisels, and some other things I don't want getting banged up down below. In the lower compartment are some marking gauges, sharpening and other tool maintenance stuff, pencils, lumber crayons, drilling tools, etc.



Here is the view from my bench. I rent shop space in the basement of an artist studio building. The building used to be a General Mills research laboratory and office complex. I share the space with my neighbor, that's all his stuff in the background.



I actually started this project some months ago. I initially designed the cabinet back in January. Then COVID happened, and then George Floyd was murdered (I live in the Twin Cities), and then my father's health failed (he died last month, not unexpectedly), and everything else you already know about from this year happened. So it hasn't been a great year for mental health/productivity. But I managed to sneak in some time here and there.

Back in August I made a bulk order (300 bf) of rough sawn black cherry, in order to avoid spending hours at the lumber yard picking through stacks during the pandemic. This should be enough wood for at least my next three or four projects.



I worked on it here and there through the end of the year. Here's where the project stands as of this morning. It doesn't look like much, but this actually represents a lot of work. I got all the boards for the project picked out from the stack, broke them all down to rough size, then got all four of the main case boards into shape and glued up into panels. Also notice the stacks of boards in the background with blue tape; those are the rough boards for the dividers, door, drawers, etc, waiting for their turn to be worked on.



In this thread I'm planning to do a brief update any time I go into the shop to work on it. This will probably be once or twice a week, assuming I don't get snowed in (Minnesota!).

If anyone has any questions or thoughts about what you see, please feel free to post. If I don't have much to say about the project and feel like writing, maybe I'll come up with some topics to share about my tools, or the studio space, or whatever.

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ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Here's today's update. I figured out where the project was since I last left it some months ago, and then got all of the case panels planed to equal width. Next time I'm planning to get the divider panel glued up, and then start in on the main case dovetails.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Here's how to process boards to glue up into a panel.

Step 1) Flatten one face. I do either the concave face or, if it's already pretty flat, the show face. I didn't bother with that low far corner since I knew it'd be ripped off later.


Step 2) Straighten the glueup edge and make it square with the face you flattened.


Step 3) Strike a line half of your desired panel width and rip off the outside edge. Hit the sawn edge with a plane to clean it up for the clamps, but don't bother truing it up.


Step 4) Do all that on the other board.


Step 5) Face the flat faces against each other and align the glue edges. Hit them with your try plane. This gives them the same-but-opposite angles, so they glue up flat even if your edges aren't exactly square to the faces. This is the clumsiest step due to that clamp on the near end. Would be nice to find a better solution here.


Step 6) Glue 'em up. After the glue dries, you can clean up the back face and plane the outside edges down to the panel's final width.


So that's the divider panel ready to go. I then was going to move on to the dovetails, but I found out the panels I glued up earlier this year had warped. This is why you don't let them sit for months. One of the purposes of joinery is each board works to hold the others in shape. If you just let them sit, they'll warp like this. I've heard some professionals will actually wrap their prepared panels in plastic and put heavy weights on them to keep them flat until they're ready to be used.



So anyway I flattened those four panels. Only two needed any significant work. Then it was late enough in the morning that I didn't think I'd have time to lay out cut dovetails, so I sharpened all of my dovetail tools, called it a day, and went to work.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Kaiser Schnitzel posted:

Excited for this thread-please post a link to in the in Woodworking thread or the bookmark browsers will never see it. Liked, subscribed, clicked the bell icon.

That's an impressive amount of hand planing. I know you're pretty traditionalist-do you glue your edge joints with hot hide glue or yellow glue or what?

Ooh the coveted notification bell.

I use Old Brown Glue for most stuff, yeah. Anything where the joint could be visible. It's easier to clean up and doesn't affect finish in the same way that yellow glue does. I do use yellow glue for things that aren't visible (e.g. laminations, some internal joinery) since it's stronger and I don't have to heat it up.

Just Winging It posted:

Interesting solution to support the board from below with those saw benches for planing. Do you have anything special planned for holding boards in place for dovetailing? I've found that clamping one end in the vice, and a holdfast through the apron on the other end to be a bit lacking in the firmness department.

That's actually exactly how I do it for boards that are short enough. It's never given me a problem. But for long boards, like the bottom board on this project, what I've done in the past is hang it off of the edge of the bench top and actually climb up on top of the bench and saw the tails facing the floor. It's awkward but works well enough. I think I heard of someone (Becksvoort?) who actually built a dovetail setup on his staircase in order to cut tails on long boards.

Edit: Ah ha! Found it.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BtY8abXgsBC/

https://www.instagram.com/p/BtY9xFSAxOw/

ColdPie fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Dec 15, 2020

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Spent the morning at the shop. Remember I said my shop is in the basement of an old GM research building? This thing was sitting in the hallway today. New Brunswick Scientific SF-116, manufacture date in 1981. According to some eBay listing (asking $1,000!), it is a "fermenter bioreactor". It has beer brewing words like "sparge" on it. Dunno. Click for huge if you want to read all the labels.



Anyway, today was dovetail day 1, although I didn't make as much progress as I wanted. I spent a ton of time thinking and re-thinking through the joinery for half-blind dovetails with a let in for the rabbet for the back boards (a rabbet is a groove cut along the edge of a board). Probably spent over an hour on layout alone, since I've never cut this joint before. I'm starting with the joinery that won't be visible, on the bottom of the cabinet. This lets me practice and learn where I need to improve before moving on the very visible upper dovetails.

As expected, the board was too tall to cut the tails upright. So I climbed up on the bench and did it facing the floor. Went well, although I cut too far on the back side (bottom of the case), as you'll see in a moment.



I use a fretsaw to cut out the bulk of the waste. Then I chopped down to the baseline with chisels.



Here's transferring the tails onto the pin board. Why is everything I build so freaking big?



After transferring the tails over to the pin board, I cut the rabbet with a Veritas skew rabbet plane I bought from a local goon. The skew on the blade is critical, as you can't always cut with the grain when cutting a rabbet. That happened here. The skew gives the blade a lower effective cutting angle, which means less tearout.



Chopping the first few pins took way, way too long. I was being too careful when removing the bulk of the waste. I switched to be far more aggressive. The picture shows where I am now doing my first initial chopping, almost all the way back to the baseline. From there it's just one more rough, and then one more careful, chop back to the baseline, and then once more into the end grain, across the end of the tail line.



So how'd it turn out? Eh, OK. I would not be happy if this was one of the visible joints. Learned some good lessons. I need to make sure the inside face is on the far side of the board when cutting tails, in case I blow past the baseline again. Here the too-deep cut is on the bottom, so who cares. When cutting the pin sockets, I need to stay clear of the layout lines and pare towards them when fitting. There are a lot of gaps in this joint, which means I cut too far into the waste. Also I somehow knocked off the front corner of the side board (leftmost pin in the photo), which sucks because that'll be very visible. Maybe the edge chamfer will hide it.

However, you can see the joinery correctly accounted for the rabbet, so my plan worked out. But, I don't like the way the layout lines look over that half-pin, or the baseline extending across there. Honestly I've never liked visible baselines on dovetails. Maybe I'll do it in pencil next time.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Well, another disappointing day in the shop. The 2nd set of dovetails also turned out pretty crappy. The test joint I made a while ago turned out fine, so I think my technique is all right. I suspect the boards have too much cup, and that's somehow causing this problem. I'll have to stop and understand what's going wrong before I keep going. If the cup is the problem, I might try out Schnitzel's suggestion before taking more thickness off.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Boring update. I knew today was going to suck, and it did. Diagnosing your failures is never fun. I'm pretty sure what went wrong was the boards just weren't flat enough. My guess is the ends of the tails pushed against the baseline of the pins, which flattened the warped boards while driving the joints together. That altered the angles of the walls, so I had to clear more wood to get them to join, and that together with my frustrated carelessness caused the huge gaps. I think the boards have warped even more since I cut the dovetails. Today the low center on the inside was probably 3/16" below the edges, I don't think I would've let that slide even by my lax standards. So my plan is to re-flatten the boards (again) before cutting the next set and hope for the best. If they suck again, I might look at applying a molding to hide them (but I think I'd have to adjust my design, since I don't think moldings would look good with the stick legs).

Anyway here's the bottom tails about as good as they're getting. They look a tad better when clamped up, but still pretty terrible. Better luck next time. Third image is my pratice joint in scrap for comparison.





ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Today I reflattened the top and sides, and cut the tails in one of the sides. I decided to do one fewer tail, both to hopefully make fitting easier, and to cover up some ugly end grain in what would have been the center pin in the top. I'm still surprised how much these panels moved after they were glued up. The weather here is so dry, I had to tighten all my bench plane handles.

You ever heard of a spill plane? Apparently they were used in some places to cut these long, spiral shavings which would hold a flame for a long time for lighting a bunch of candles, etc. I got a bunch of those long, curly shavings when cutting the rabbet in the top for the back boards.





ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Decent morning at the shop today. Got the sockets chopped out and I'm reasonably happy with them. The only big mistake is a couple of the sockets were cut about 1/16" too deep. Not sure how that happened, maybe the board shifted while I was laying out or something.

Transferring the tails to the pin board.




Here you can see the sapwood in the end grain at the very center, which I eliminated by putting a tail across the center.




Light helps show the layout lines.




The final joint. You can see the gap on the far two sockets. In any case, far better than the mess the other two joints turned out to be.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Haha, yeah, I call it my ugly mallet. The oak handle came from a crappy German-style mallet that I made. It broke after just a couple uses. By coincidence I trimmed off a wild branch from the maple tree in our back yard shortly after, so I cut off a chunk of that fresh maple, stripped the bark and shaped it a little with a spokeshave, then stuck it on the handle tang with some glue and let the wood dry tight around the joint. Been working great for years, but it is a bit frightening to look at. The directionality of the handle means two sides of it see a lot more use than the other two sides, so it's become a bit deformed.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Cut the last set of case tails this morning. For laying out dovetails, I use the "two dividers" method. The smaller dividers holds the size of the pins on the ends. In this case, that's the same width as the rabbet for the back. The larger dividers holds the size of one tail plus one pin. You walk from one of the end pin marks, across the board however many tails you want. Then walk back from the other end pin mark. Adjust until you like the size of the pins between the tail marks. I do that in some scrap marked to the width of the board, but I think experts could probably just do it straight into the end grain. If you look close in this photo you can see the divider marks I made before the pencil lines.




Bonus ugly mallet.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Didn't go in Sunday because it snowed, and today was a short morning at the shop, as my wife needed the car, but I didn't want to skip two full weeks between shop visits. Just got the tails transferred and saw kerfs cut, then sharpened the chisels for next time.



To make up for it, here's the sign you see when you walk into my building. It's cool working in an artist studio building. The buildings are connected by either skyways or underground tunnels, which is a common thing for building complexes here in the frozen north, so you don't even have to go outside to move around. I think there are eight buildings in the whole complex, this sign is just for these three closely connected buildings. In the Before Times, there were one or two big open studio days a year, usually coinciding with other big art crawl days around the Twin Cities. A couple years back I even shook hands with another goon whose partner worked out of one of the other buildings. There's a lot of different types of artists scattered around the buildings: painters, collage, photographers, fiber arts of all kinds, I think there's a large metalworking studio tucked away in one of the basements. There's even a huge glass blowing studio, which I intend to give its own writeup sometime. There are also some businesses. Up in the offices, I saw one place that will buy/take old trophies and re-plaque them, which I thought was a cool idea. Since it used to be a GM lab, it is prepped for food work, so there's a number of caterers and kitchens that supply retail shops around the cities, as well as a coffee roaster.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Yeah, both. It gets you a little deeper into the corners of the sockets so there's less you have to separate freehand with a chisel, so it's less work and the sawplate is more accurate. Like you say, they'll be hidden behind a door on one side, and behind drawers on the other. I wouldn't do it if these were more visible joints, like open cabinet bays.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Here's an example of the half-blind dovetail sockets. You can see the unsevered corner waste in the nearest socket. I drew a couple lines onto the socket behind that one, showing where the unsevered waste would be with shallower saw cuts which don't go past the base line. Not having to freehand chisel so near a visible surface is a pretty big plus. I use the fishtail chisel to sever the fibers deep in the corners, then pare it off with a chisel, referencing the chisel against the pin wall made by the saw kerf.



Here's the final joint. Not surprisingly, the latest one is the best one.



And here's the case all together, 4' wide and 2' tall.



The top two joints look pretty decent, I am satisfied with them. The bottom two joints are a mess. The worst corner (front right) is shown below. The huge gap in the front there is because that board now has a cup. I think I can mostly solve it by removing thickness from the inside center of the board, which should shrink that gap, at the expense of making the dovetails even crappier (I'll have to shave down the ends of the center couple tails.) But they're not visible, so whatever. I was also thinking maybe I could instead glue a little scrap in there to fill the gap, but that would some very short grain. Dunno.

I also screwed up a bit and forgot to match the length between the baselines on the top and bottom boards, so the inside-bottom of the case is 1/4" longer than the top. That's totally on me, I knew I needed to do that and just forgot. That leads to a little bit of a trapezoid shape, 1/8" out of square on both bottom corners. But I think it's slight enough that I won't bother fixing it.



After I try to make those joints a little less lovely, next on the list is to cut the joinery in the top and bottom for the vertical center divider. I am probably going to do dadoes to capture the divider, but I'm also thinking about doing sliding dovetails. This would have a big advantage of joining the top and bottom together directly. The way I did the dovetails on the bottom board, it is not secured against gravity (with no glue/friction, the bottom would just fall downwards if you lift the case up). It would also help with preventing cupping/bowing in the top and bottom boards. However, I don't think I would have the accuracy required to do two good sliding dovetails across the entire 18" depth of the case. So I was thinking of doing dadoes, and then driving two or three nails in from the bottom to help secure it.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Let's talk dovetail repair. This was my first time doing something like this.

The problem was caused by a cup introduced in the side board, causing the center to make contact while the edges were still loose. After planing the inside face of the side board flat, it introduced this big gap due to the ends of the tails bumping against the inside edge of the sockets.



Solution? Cut off the ends of the tails by the width of the gap.



Now the joint looks tight, but there's a new problem. Moving the tails further into the sockets introduced some play between the tail sides and the socket walls. It's a bit hard to see in this photo (look at the topmost full pin), but when putting the joint together, the pins would slight right onto the tails with no friction. That's bad, since most of the glue strength in a dovetail joint comes from the contact between those side walls. Everything else involves end grain, which provides very little glue strength.



So I fashioned these little wedges from some scrap. This restores some of the material of the sockets, so I can then re-transfer the tails and pare down the new wood to restore the tightness of the joint.





Here's the joint after refitting. If you look close, you can see the little sub-mm scraps that remain after refitting the joint. It looks terrible, but it's not a visible joint, and this should make it strong again. If this was a visible joint, I probably would have just cut the end of the top and bottom boards off and re-cut those parts of the joint from scratch, sacrificing some of the final cabinet width.



And the visible part of the joint looks nice and tight now.



One thing I'm a little concerned about is the dryness of this wood. I haven't measured it (yet), but I think the shop is amazingly dry, thanks to Minnesota weather and indoor heating. So I worry a bit that these nice tight joints will explode when they expand during our humid summers. We get both extremes here. I guess we'll see?

ColdPie fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Feb 7, 2021

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

I hope you're right because this wood is dryyyy.



Today I prepped the center divider. Since every face and edge of this board will either be used for joinery or be visible, I bothered to make it completely square. All edges parallel and two parallel faces. After making one face flat, you set your depth gauge to the board's narrowest point (or your desired final thickness), then transfer that face's flatness to the other face with a depth gauge. Put on some active music, set your plane to a heavy cut, and take the whole opposite face down to that line.



Next time I'll cut the dadoes for the center divider into the case.

After that comes the webbing for the drawers, which is something I haven't done before. I'll be following this example, out of the Hayward collection from Lost Art Press. A front rail, into which the two runners are mortised, then fit into dadoes in the case's side and center divider.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

This morning I got the center divider installed. I use my fine crosscut saw to cut the walls of the dado, then a chisel to take out the bulk of the waste and a router plane to take it down to the right depth (forgot to take a picture).



After cutting the first one, I mark the depth of the cut for the other dado referencing off the first one.



These drawers are gonna be pretty huge. I hope they're not too heavy and difficult to open. I need to start thinking about what I want to do for drawer pulls. I was planning just one center pull, but maybe a pull on each side would work better for such large drawers. For the large drawer, I was planning like a half-moon shape cut out of the top of the drawer face, since it's low down. I'll have to sketch this out a bit and look up some references.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Kaiser Schnitzel posted:

That's a really great solution. You could even do it on the pin boards too to fill those gaps if you wanted-it would still be a long grain/long grain glue joint on the patch, and I think the back of the tails like that do help keep things square, but it's definitely not necessary. Using the same wood it will probably hide pretty well under finish too. My old boss used to say the difference between an amateur and a professional is that a professional knows how to hide fix their mistakes.

I've been waffling on whether I want to put in the effort to close up those gaps like you say.

Granite Octopus posted:

The grooves in the sides of the runners indicate there’ll be a “dustboard” separating the drawer openings. Are you going to have them? I don’t think I’ve seen that before in old furniture here.

I think in that diagram, the area below the drawers is an open bay, so the dustboards separate the drawers from that space. I've just got a stack of drawers, so I'm not doing any dustboards, no.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Last night I got started on the drawer webbing. I grabbed this board out of the stack. It was a good width (5") and had a few knots and gnarly grain, and since I really only need one decent looking edge for these, it's a good opportunity to avoid wasting that nasty wood.



After crosscutting the pieces out, I marked a parallel line down the middle with my crappy homemade panel gauge. I think it was Shannon Rogers where I first heard that your fastest plane is your saw. Marking the saw line parallel to one edge means, no matter what, there is at most one edge which you'll need to make parallel with a plane. In this case parallel doesn't really matter, but you might as well do it this way anyway.



For short rips like these, I use my vise. Way easier than trying to hold a short, narrow board down with my knee on the sawbenches.



Processing these short sticks is so pleasant after the rigamarole of trying to flatten those wide and long panels. No need to secure them or mess around with straightedges. Just a few passes with the No 8 up against the planing stop gets them flat with no questions.



I thought it'd be fun to shoot a video of processing one of the boards. If you'd like to watch a guy plane a board for three minutes, you are in luck!! This is pretty much the least amount of processing you can do to a board, although getting the first edge square to the face gave me some trouble so it took some extra time. For these boards, I really only need one flat face (for the drawer to ride on) and one square edge (to fit into the dado). The edges and faces don't really need to be parallel with each other. So I didn't bother doing that, just got rid of the machine marks and made everything roughly square so it's nice to work with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSKsLgDdf0A

Repeat for the other five boards, and they're all ready for joinery. As shown in the diagram above, the short boards will be tenoned into the long rails, and then slotted into dadoes in the center divider and right wall. The drawers will then rest on that assembly.



I laid out where the drawers will go, just to see how it actually looks in the real world instead of a CAD model. I waffled a bit on whether to shrink the lowest drawer in order to expand the others, maybe even do even thirds. But in the end I think I'll stick with the original plan.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Got the webbing joinery done today.

Tenon layout using two marking gauges. One with two cutting wheels, to mark the thickness of the tenon matching the width of the chisel, and the other to mark the shoulders.



Chopping mortises with the pigsticker. Narrow chisel clears waste, and the square matches the tenon length to check for depth. I was a bit concerned about blowing out the end grain while levering the chisel, but it wasn't a problem.



Looking good. Coming up next are the dadoes in the case to fit the webbing.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Just Winging It posted:

As a matter of fact, I do like watching a guy plane boards. Breaking out the big plane is always nice. This also highlights something that took me a while to really grasp, that there's no need to plane all your material 4-square unless the situation really requires it. Getting a face flat, and an edge square to it is often enough, and just making the other surfaces just look nice enough is a lot less fiddly and effort than making them all parallel. Which is important when you're doing it all by hand.

My No 8 is maybe my favorite tool. It is huge and old. Almost ten pounds, just under two feet long, and the cutting edge is three inches wide, which just barely fits on my sharpening stones. According to the online dating tools, it's a type 8 which dates to between 1899 and 1902, which means it is older than any living person. It might be the oldest tool I own, and it's definitely the oldest tool I have a definitive date for. I bought it locally from a guy on Craigslist. I went to buy a wooden try plane, saw this on his shelf and asked if he'd sell me that instead. If I remember right, I paid $100 for it. Mine happens to have a corrugated sole.

It's wonderful to use. Unlike the No 5, which is mostly used for boring donkey work, or the No 4, where you're cursing every imperfection, the No 8 just plows through anything and makes stuff flat, it's a great feeling. It doesn't take any guff.

It's stamped on both sides with HJE. I wonder who HJE was and when they were using this plane.



ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Dadoes all day. If I was going to use a power tool, I think a handheld router would be at the top of the list. I hate cutting dadoes.

Here's a picture of my old router plane. These things are surprisingly expensive, I think I paid like $90 for it, which is almost enough to get you a brand new Veritas. I don't really like using it, because it really mars the surface of the work. It has a couple of screwholes, where you can mount a block of wood to the sole, which would damage the work less. I should probably make one sometime.



One thing hand tools are really bad at is stopped joinery. Hand tools are designed to work all the way through the piece, not end at some point. I didn't want to blow the dado through the rabbet for the back boards, so I stopped short and worked with a chisel to sever the fibers before routing them out.



It's coming together!



And a shot from the rear. Yeah, my shop's right next to the toilet.



Next I need to take down the front edge of all of the case boards to clean them up and match widths. After that, I'm going to work on making and mounting the legs. Then it's on to a variety of final cleanup tasks before I glue the whole thing together.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

As you can see in the original CAD model at the top of the thread, I'm doing staked legs. The legs have conical tenons which slot into a matching mortise in the bottom of the case. I've done this joint a few times before, you've seen it in this thread on the sawbenches in various photos. However I have never really successfully done the joint, as you can see in this photo of a little stool I made.



Getting the angles of the mortise all correct is really challenging. In the past, I've just used a line on the work piece to align the drill bit, and a sliding bezel to spot the elevation, all just done by eye. It works out all right, but every time at least one leg turns out wonky. So this time, I'm going to make a template with a mortise angle which looks right, then use that template to guide the drill bit so each mortise will hopefully end up at the same angle.

But before that, I need some more material to mortise into. The thickness of the bottom piece is about 7/8", which isn't enough for the mortise. So I used some of the crappier wood from my pile to put a little extra meat onto the bottom. Since these will never be seen, I didn't bother to do more than knock off the saw marks and put a little taper on each side. I just used Titebond since hide glue is more finicky and wouldn't provide any advantages on a lamination glue up like this.

I also need to laminate some leg stock. I'd like the legs to be at least 2" square, before I turn them into octagons. I have some left over 6/4 cherry from a table I built, which I can rip and laminate together to get that thickness.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Busted!

No posting jail can hold me!! YOU'LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE, SCHNITZEL!!!!

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

This morning I glued on the other extra meat, then moved on to the legs. I didn't have any real dimensions planned for this, so I sketched out the maximum size of two 6/4 boards glued up and then eyeballed it against the cabinet. Way too big. So I sketched something a bit smaller and liked that size.



So I ripped out two pieces to glue together. If I was Chris Schwarz, and had a bandsaw, I might have done an additional cut to follow the grain. But I'm not Chris Schwarz, and I don't have a bandsaw, so I didn't.



Here's a carefully staged photo where I ripped it halfway on the tablesaw, then transferred it to my vise next to this handsaw I keep around only for staged photos. The other side of the saw plate has a nice farm scene painted on.



And here's the first leg glued up. I used hide glue here, since the glue line might be visible in the final piece. My plan is to take this leg all the way through to the end before I batch out the other legs, just in case I decide to change size or otherwise screwed something up. So next up will be octagonalizing it, then figuring out how to do these mortises in a way that doesn't suck.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Very nice morning at the shop today. I squared up the leg I glued up last time. I put in the effort to make the glue line in the center. I'm not sure if it was worth the effort, as it meant planing about 1/2" instead of just sawing it off. The glue line isn't very noticeable in the final leg, so maybe I won't bother next time.

Then got started on turning it into a tapered octagon. Credit where it's due, mostly everything here came from Chris Schwarz's Anarchist's Design Book. First, find the center, then set your dividers from one corner to the center. Mark out that width on both sides of the corner. This will mark out the corners of the octagon. Really, you only need to make one mark, then set your marking gauge to that size, since it's all square anyway, but this helps visualize it for the photo.



Here's the jig I use for making octagons. I think it might be the first jig I ever made. I first used it for the legs on the sawbenches. The cradle itself is made from leftover pine from the workbench.



Set your jack plane to a deep cut and quickly work each corner down until the lines are nearly gone. Then use your try plane on a light cut to finish off each side.



Not too much later, you'll have an octagon.



For the taper, I chose one end to be the top, which will be the narrow end. I marked a line into the end grain parallel to each edge, about 1/3 of the radius in from each of the 8 edges. The first step is to use the jack plane to take down about the first 1/3 of the leg down to that line. Be sure to reference against the flat of the octagonal face, as you won't have an opportunity to re-square things up at this point if you lean left or right.



After that, work your way back towards the thick end, just taking off the "hump" left behind by the previous pass, until you run out of leg. Then grab your try plane and work down the remaining hump across the middle, checking it with your straightedge. This leaves you with a nice, flat tapered face. Repeat seven times. Then reflect on the fact that you have three more of these legs to do.



After that I put it kinda in place next to the cabinet to see how it'd look in practice. Walking around, looking at it from different angles, I tried a few different leaning angles. Anyway, I think it looks good this size.

Also, if you look closely at this photo, you can see the sawbench on the left has tapered legs while the one on the right has straight legs that I didn't bother to taper. It doesn't really come across in photos, but the taper makes a huge difference. The right sawbench looks super rough and chunky, while the other one has a nice look to it. The taper is worth the effort.



Next is to cut the conical tenon. I marked the shoulder based on the thickness of the bottom of the cabinet. I have this reference conical tenon that I cut years ago (it's actually one end of the clamp I use for sharpening saws), so I eyeballed where the cone would start and end and used the outside calipers to estimate how deep I needed to cut the shoulders.



After cutting the shoulders to depth, I use a chisel to rough out the cone shape. The grain really fought me on this one, kept wanting to dive into the meat of the tenon. Then I use the giant pencil sharpener to take it down to the final shape.



Nice leg.



Next is the part I'm not super happy about. I've never been good at making these mortises. In theory you use the bevel gauge to guide your drilling, first the 5/8" bit then reaming it with the tapered reamer to match the conical tenon. I've tried braces and power drills and I always end up with at least one wonky leg. So here's my plan for this one. I'm cutting the mortises first into this piece of scrap wood. The first mortise turned out all right, it's at least at a good 45 degree angle to the edges, even if it's a tad steeper than I had planned. After I make each leg, I will repeatedly cut mortises into this scrap for that leg until I end up with a mortise where that leg's angles match the first leg's. Then, I'll use this scrap as a guide for the tapered reamer on the final product, hopefully reproducing those mortise angles more reliably than when I freehand it against a bevel gauge. My power drill is at home today, so I used my bit brace, but I plan to try the power drill again and see how it feels.



Anyway I'm happy with how this leg turned out, so I did some ripping and got the next one started.



And I noticed my saw was getting a little soft, so I gave it a quick sharpen and called it a day.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Bloody posted:

So for the tenon you hand sawed it into an octagonal tenon then used a chisel to pare that down to a rounder tapered-er thing?

Not quite. I crosscut the shoulder with the saw, then use a chisel to hack away most of the waste before going to the Tapered Tenon Cutter. You could use a saw to remove the waste, too, instead of a chisel. I'll take more pictures next time.

Just Winging It posted:

Those are some big teeth on that saw, 4-5 tpi? Does the increase in teeth size make a notable difference compared to, say, a 7 tpi rip saw of similar length?

Yep, according to the stamp on the sawplate, it's 5 (TPI? PPI?). It's my only full size rip saw, so I can't give you a comparison. It does go through stock pretty quick though, and is fairly rough on the exit side.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Yeah, I agree with GEMorris, it's a great book. To be brutally honest, I don't really like Schwarz's furniture. But I really love his writing and philosophy. He focuses on furniture-making being accessible to everybody, not just people with thousands of dollars of power tools and rooms big enough to put them, and that really connects with me. His "Three Tables" essay from The Anarchist's Toolchest is like, the whole reason why I make stuff put perfectly into words. And the design discussions, tool techniques, and construction guidelines all apply even if you aren't using his designs specifically. If you could somehow move that Three Tables essay into the Design Book, it would be the perfect intro book to home furniture making.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

We are super busy at work, so I only had an hour this morning before I had to scoot. So I just got the new leg squared up and then sharpened tools and cleaned up. I was hoping to get the next leg ripped and glued, but ran out of time. I've learned the cleanup time sneaks up on you, and just leaving it for next time isn't really polite in a shared shop.



To make up for the very boring post, I will share yesterday's blog post from Chris which is extremely relevant to our conversation: Chairs & Crapitalism It touches on the same points as the "Three Tables" essay I keep going on about, but it's about chairs instead.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Let's ripping!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpU4q-6rTnA

That's about 15" in 6/4 cherry. It's hard to start a cut with such large teeth, so I actually start rip cuts with my large tenon saw, first square across the board and then down the line, in order to more easily get the kerf started straight. Saws want to cut straight, so if you get it started right and then get yourself out of the saw's way, your cut will be nice and straight.

Here's the waste side of that board right off the saw, just a few passes with the plane cleans up that edge and it's ready for the next rip.



Today I got the remaining two legs ripped out and glued up, and also finished shaping the leg from last time. Still to do: finish shaping the last two legs, make tapered tenons on three legs, then cut three matching mortises.



Also I saw these HUGE WILD TURKEYS this morning and it made my whole day.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Bloody posted:

So for the tenon you hand sawed it into an octagonal tenon then used a chisel to pare that down to a rounder tapered-er thing?

I cut another of the tenons today, so here's some more process pictures. In this first photo, the tenon I cut last time is on the right, and today's workpiece is on the left. I used the existing tenon to mark the depth of the shoulder on the sawplate and scribe the size of the top of the tenon in the end grain of the new workpiece.



Then I cut the shoulders, parallel to the top of the workpiece. Obviously this is too large to fit the giant pencil sharpener onto, so you have to get it roughly into shape before you can use the tenon cutter to clean it up into a nice conical tenon.



I use a chisel to hog off most of the waste. You can use the layout markings to imagine the shape of the conical tenon within the wood. In the past, I would work into the end grain towards the shoulder, but I found that always split into the actual meat of the tenon, which is bad. So this time I worked from the shoulder towards the end grain, which took a bit more effort, but gave a better result. I found working bevel-down gave good results most quickly.



As it starts to get close to size, you can start fitting and using the tenon cutter, and seeing where it gets stuck. If you look close at this photo you can see a little black mark near the shoulder on the tenon where the tenon cutter is bottoming out before its cutter can get into place. That shows me where I still need to work with the chisel.



Eventually it'll bottom out against the shoulder and you're done.



In "Design Book," Schwarz recommends doing this rough shaping on a lathe if you can, and suggests this as a backup method. You can see why. It's fiddly and a lot of work. Building a spring pole lathe is on my "maybe someday" list.



Also I thought this was a cool moment. I had one leg at each major step of the process so I lined them all up.



Currently I have two completed legs, one still needs its tenon cut, and the last one is still untouched from the glue-up. Soon I'll run out of excuses to keep putting off cutting the mortises.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

I got the legs done yesterday. Next up is doing all the mortises, then maybe a little messing with the drawer web frames (not quite sure yet how I want to attach them at the back), then I think it's on to final cleanup tasks like smoothing and breaking edges, before it's time for glue-up. Unless I forgot something.



Let's talk about the design of the piece a little bit. It's mostly inspired by Christian Becksvoort's work, with a splash of Chris Schwarz. This first group of pictures below were taken from Becksvoort's Shaker Inspiration book. When I'm working on a design, I think about two things: how I want it to look, and what I'm capable of doing with my tools and skills. I look at furniture pictures mostly from woodworkers I like, but also in online image searches, until I get a picture of what I want. Then I figure out how I can build something that looks like that.

Most professional woodworkers use power tools, of course, so there's usually some adaptation (boy, y'all like stopped dadoes). That's where Schwarz comes in. The last two photos below are from The Anarchist's Design Book. His designs are mostly created with hand tools in mind, so I use the techniques I learned from him to adapt others' furniture styles.

In this case, I wanted to make a piece like Becksvoort. I like the simple, unadorned style. His work is inspired by Shaker designs, which date back to pre-industrial woodworking, so they're easy to adapt. He turns out really beautiful work that doesn't require a ton of specialized skill to execute. Cherry is a beautiful wood and easy to work with hand tools (I bought my big stock because of his book). I plan to copy his cool carved door design and might do the pegged corner joints. I haven't decided yet on what to do about drawer and door pulls.

However, I don't have the skills to make sliding dovetails for the drawer webbing, and I don't really like those curved kickplates and I'm not sure I could make them anyway. So instead of the sliding dovetails, I used simple dadoes like Schwarz describes for his boarded bookcase. And instead of the curved kickplates, I decided to use staked legs since I'm familiar with the technique and I like the look better. The idea for the extra "meat" for the stakes to go into was taken from Schwarz's trestle table design.













ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Whew, good to get in out of the rain, it's been nonstop all week. Time to get started on the mortises and... oh no...



Aggh not again. The rain doesn't drain properly off the roof of the building. In the past, it would leak through the foundation and into our room from the walls. Today it apparently came up the drain, since there was no river coming from the wall.



The room funnels down to the drain. At its deepest, it's over an inch of water. Most of the room is covered in about 1/2" of water. I moved stuff out of the way as best I could. There wasn't a whole lot of damage. I think the cherry stack is fine. At worst the ends of the bottom boards might be stained where the sticker soaked through, but I shoved some wedges in there to hopefully dry it out. Mostly the scrap pile got hit, so we'll probably lose a few inches off the ends of of most of the scrap boards. More annoying is the rain shows no sign of letting up, so this probably puts the workshop out of commission for at least a week or two. Sigh. After it stops raining, I'll go grab the mop bucket out of the maintenance closet and do what I can.

I emailed the building management and they said they're working on the roof drainage issue. The building is under new management since last year. The previous management company just told me they'd fix it and then did nothing. Maybe the new ones will actually fix it. They have fixed other things that had been long neglected, like the broken urinal. They've also been overhauling the entire electric system across the complex. Hope springs eternal.

Well, at least the rent is cheap.

ColdPie fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Apr 8, 2021

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

BACK IN BUSINESS

Today I got all my poo poo back where it belongs, then got to work on the mortises. This is probably the step I've been dreading the most in the entire process, maybe after fitting the drawers (never done drawers before). I did a few more test mortises in some scrap, trying out using the template I made earlier. For the initial mortise hole, I tried using a forstner bit in my power drill, but the template keeps the chips from clearing, so it clogged really quick. I ended up just using the bit-and-brace, it goes quick and is easy to control. Then I use the power drill for the tapered reamer, since that is a whole lot harder to control with the brace.

After I figured that out, I laid out where the mortises will go into the bottom of the cabinet. I did the best I could to measure a 3" overhang from the ends of the legs, which will actually be a bit more once the legs are trimmed. Then I used the template to reproduce that measurement on the other four corners.



Time for surface prep with the smoothing plane, since it'll be easier to do without the holes.



I screwed the template down to hold it in place.



Here's the whole operation.



While fitting the first leg, I found the tenons are about 1/2" too short. In retrospect, I think I didn't account for the angle of the mortise when guesstimating how long to make the tenons. Correcting that ate some time. I was hoping to get all four mortises done today, but ran out of time.



Another tip from Design Book, while you're drilling, as soon as you can feel the tip of the auger bit poking through the work, stop and flip the work over, then drill from the other side. That gives you a clean exit hole, as the spurs on the bit will cut a nice circle instead of blowing out from the pressure. I stopped too late on the first hole (bottom of this picture) and the thin material chipped out while I was drilling from the top side.



Here's the two mortises I got done today.





Not bad! I'm happy with that. You can see with the exit hole in the following picture that I had to correct the angle of the 2nd mortise, which led to a fairly ovular mortise. The wedge will probably close that up a bit, but it may end up gappy. I'll have to be more careful to correct early on the other two mortises. These holes will be hidden beneath the drawers, so I'm not too torn up about it. Always do the hidden joinery first!

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

I went in on Thursday morning and did a little surface prep, just smooth planing faces. This morning I got the other two mortises cut for the legs.

The good news:



The bad news :stonk: :



The good news again: it was just janky because it was following the original course of the hole before I corrected it. So with some shimming it should come to the right angle. The two mortises I cut today turned out perfect.





The gap:



My plan is to cut a handful of small wedges to cover in glue and drive into the top & bottom gaps, to give more glue surface and encourage it to go in the right direction. It's not a great solution, but well, it is what it is. This is the kind of stuff I wouldn't have shared in the main woodworking thread and just given the end result. Nothing to see here :v:

Anyway up next was to drill the oval holes to secure the back ends of the drawer runners, which won't be glued for wood expansion reasons. There's not a lot of case meat for the screw to go into here, so I hope the couple of threads will be enough. I don't think the screws will get much force applied to them anyway, so probably fine.



I drilled three overlapping holes and cleared them out with a chisel. After verifying the screw fits freely in the hole, I used a countersink bit and a small chisel to get the screw seated at the right depth. Then I fit them in the cabinet, marked the screw location, and drilled super shallow pilot holes for them.



And here's everything pretty much ready for assembly.



I do have some things to figure out before assembly.

Surface prep is mostly done already, but I need to figure out what to do about breaking all the edges. Most of the edges have some part that should stay square where they intersect with other boards, so my typical technique of just running the smooth plane along the edge a few times is probably not the right thing to do. I was thinking maybe wait until after assembly, then use a block plane and either a sanding block or my fine cabinet rasp to get into the corners. But maybe there's a better option.

I also need to decide whether to pre-finish the pieces. I usually do, since finishing after assembly sucks. But then I'd either have to spend hours applying finish in a parking lot, or bring all the boards to and from home. Since the weather's nice I'm kind of leaning just do it in the parking lot. On the other hand, there's quite a lot of joinery here, so it might be better to apply finish after assembly so I have less chance of applying finish somewhere I shouldn't. I'll also have to re-finish the areas where the legs tenons will be cut off. Or do the legs, then finish, then assemble the whole thing. Dunno.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Kaiser Schnitzel posted:

The legs look really neat! Will you cut the bottom of the feet off so they are parallel to the floor or let it sit just the corner of each foot?

Yes, the case will be leveled after assembly by cutting the ends off the legs.

Kaiser Schnitzel posted:

For the loose tenons/dowels, another option is to rip a kerf (or two, perpendicular to each other) down the tenon and wedge the tenon. In a through tenon like that it might work better because you can expand the end of the tenon bigger than the hole, and you are gluing long grain wedges to long grain tenon whereas you'd probably be gluing to endgrain more on the mortice.

Yeah, the tenons will be wedged. But this gap is huuuge so will need some extra filler.

Kaiser Schnitzel posted:

For breaking edges, I don't think there's anything better than assembling and sanding the sharp edges after assembly. I never pre-finish stuff and it lets you be a little less than perfect with assembly and gives you a chance to plane/sanding everything flush. Pre-finishing the inside faces of everything might not be a bad idea? It's a little easier to spray the inside of a cabinet than to wipe it all. Lots of antiques are basically unfinished on the interior for this reason, or they got a quick coat of shellac and some wax, but not the full French polish the outside gets (because only servants open the drawers so who cares if it's shiny).

Just Winging It posted:

I'm with Schnitzel here. Pre-finishing the inside parts that'll be mighty awkward to get to once it's assembled is something I've taken to doing myself lately, and I rather like it. Then again, I mostly make boxes where everything except the bottom is in full view, not carcasses where everything will be out of sight.

All right, thanks for the feedback. I think finishing the inside shouldn't be too tough after it's assembled, as I'll have full access from the front and back. No deep corners unlike a box.

Dr. Kyle Farnsworth posted:

I am lightly amused you use hand tools only but mock up your designs in CAD.

This is an awesome thread and awesome project.

Thanks, always nice to hear. I do also sketch on paper a bit, both the rough design before CAD and then some specific design or joinery sketches during the building process. I'm not very good at drawing, and not really interested in learning to do nice architectural perspective sketches, so having the model in CAD lets me look at the piece from different angles and quickly try different proportions and design ideas. The process of building the thing in CAD also kind of forces you to think through every joint. Where you can just sketch a line on paper, in CAD you have to actually put the pieces together and think, how will I join these? Or it points out something you might have skipped from a front-only sketch, like how the center divider in this cabinet has to be about 1" shallower than the other case pieces to accommodate the back. I don't actually bother modeling all those details, but I use the process to form a mental plan for how it will be built an identify practical problems in the design.

Here's some of the sketches. I was stuck on the idea of a sliding door, since I was concerned a hinged door would be awkward once placed in the room. The idea for the staked legs was there from the start, but I also kind of like the plinth style sketches in the bottom left.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

I got my second vaccine dose last weekend! That's exciting for lots of reasons, but relevant to this thread it means I can start taking the bus again soon, which means I don't have to work around my wife's work schedule and can probably start getting into the shop more often. Yay!

Huge day today. I started by finishing the last of the pre-glue-up tasks, by cutting the slots for the wedges in the legs' tenons, and then hitting the legs with the smoothing plane. I already had a few wedges cut from previous projects, so I trimmed four of those to size and cut the rest into small wedges for filling in the awkward gaps a bit.



Here's the setup just before I applied glue. I used Tite-bond for these joints, as I've found from experience that hide glue is too weak for these leg joints and tends to fail after a while. The joints are also largely not visible, and squeeze out isn't a huge issue anyway, since you trim off the tenon stubs.



Here's the awkward filled tenons from the bottom,



And the top,



Whatever. Pencils down, let's see how it turned out.





Nice! So I let that cure while I went to grab an early lunch.

I wasn't sure whether I would do the full glue-up today, but it wasn't even 10 AM by the time the leg glue was cured enough to move on. So I went for it. I started with a dry rehearsal, to figure out where clamps will go, get them set to the right widths, look for awkward assembly points.



Then it was on to the real deal. Here I used hide glue on all the joints. I warm up the glue in its bottle with an electric kettle, then squeeze the warm glue into a leftover coffee cup to apply with a toothbrush. This lets me keep most of the glue in the bottle in the warm water, while periodically squeezing more into the cup to quickly apply before it cools.

I had to assemble it upside-down, but I wanted to have it upright for inserting the drawer webbing and letting the glue cure, so I had to flip the fucker over, while the glue was drying, with a few clamps on, without knocking the still-drying legs around. That took a few awkward stages, but I got there.

After assembly, I washed off the toothbrush and then went around cleaning up squeeze out by vigorously brushing it off with the toothbrush and remaining warm water.

Here it is from the back, and front.





And it's sitting like that in the shop until the next time I go in. Next up is trimming and leveling the legs, cleaning up those stub tenons, and then any more cleanup like planing the dovetails flush. Then it's on to the door & drawers!

Over the weekend, Matt Kenney (previously of Fine Woodworking magazine, now independent) posted a picture of himself being interviewed, and in the background I noticed this coffee table that's pretty similar in form to what I'm aiming for. I'm not sure what to do for the drawer pulls yet. I've thought about doing that open half-moon shape, like in the picture, and may just end up doing that.

ColdPie fucked around with this message at 19:30 on May 16, 2021

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Busy month so not much shop time unfortunately. I did go in at the end of May but forgot to write it up. I cut off the little nubbins from the staked legs. I don't have a flush cut saw (really ought to get one of those by now...) so I just use my big handsaw with some tape to protect the wood.



Leftover nubbins.



I decided I will do the drawers next, then the door last. So I dug out the board for the first drawer front from the pile and got it sized to fit.



Fast forward a few weeks to today. This is my first time making a drawer. I'm following the procedure for drawer-making outlined in some of the articles from the Hayward collection. He says the drawer front should be about 7/8" and the back and sides should be about 3/8". I don't have enough scrap to make all of the backs and sides, so I dug into my 4/4 cherry pile to find some uglier boards. This guy will do nicely for the sides. The grain sucks the knot sucks that gross looking inclusion sucks. Let's turn it into something not-very-visible.



But it's 4/4 and I need 3/8". How do you get two 3/8" boards from a single 4/4 board? Resaw that sucker.



It's not as bad as it looks. Took about ten minutes, including time for water and photo breaks. Waxing the sawplate helps a lot, there's a ton of friction going on here. The resaw procedure is to place the board at an angle, as shown, and follow the guide line down the side of the board facing you. Then flip it every inch or so. The far end of the saw should follow the path of least resistance, which is the kerf on the far side, so you'll always be following the guide line as you work down each side of the board.



Boards.



After a little cleanup planing, they're right at about 3/8". Perfect.



I was able to break out my shooting board to square up the ends. Most stuff I build is too big to bother with a shooting board.



Oh, we need a back too? More resawing. Fifteen sweaty minutes later, we have some nice bookmatched boards. One of these will be the back for the 2nd drawer.



Next up, more dovetails. I'm planning to use 1/4" plywood for the bottom, which I have yet to purchase. I'm a little concerned that may not be strong enough for drawers this size (about 2' by 1'), but the bottom will be captured on all four sides, so hopefully it'll be fine?

ColdPie fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Jun 13, 2021

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Elder Postsman posted:

I rebuilt the silverware drawer in our kitchen that was about 32w x 15d with 1/4” ply for the bottom and it’s held up just fine. I think you’ll be good.

Cool, good to hear, thanks.

Just Winging It posted:

I'm guessing drawer slips for the bottom?

Yup exactly. I'm not super good at mouldings so it'll be a challenge to get it to turn out well, but I'd like to get better at it so I'm looking forward to it.

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ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

Bought some plywood for the bottoms and tongue-and-groove boards for the back of the case this morning. Then went into the shop. I didn't feel like doing dovetails today, so I finished prepping the drawer pieces and then got to work on the slips.

This article from the Hayward collection is the primary source I'm following.



I'm following this style of drawer slips on the left side of "C" in this diagram:



Since these parts get a lot of wear, I dug out some white oak left over from a previous project. It suffered some water damage from the flood earlier this year, and has some sapwood. Great to use for a less-visible component. For a solid bottom board, like described in the book, you let the bottom pass below the back of the drawer. But since I'm using thin plywood, I want a groove on all four sides to support the bottom, so I'm doing a slip on the back as well. That comes to about 4' of material.



I got to bust out a moulding plane. I don't use these often since I don't really do mouldings much, and I don't really have the right tool to sharpen them. It's fun when I get an excuse to use them. The plow plane made the groove for the bottom board.



Then rip it off and we're done. For long rips without a great workholding situation, I do this benchtop overhand rip. I don't really like doing this, since you lose the benefit of gravity pulling you through the cut, but it works.



And we have some drawer slip material. It's a little on the thick side (something like 3/4") so I might plane the back down a tad after I cut it to size.



Next time: dovetails, for real this time.

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