Greene & Greene End Table - #2 Leg Layout & Mortising Machine

With a stack of flattened, square and straight stock I could get started on the project.  First are the legs that start by being milled down to final thickness, width and an inch or so long.  They will get a taper to one face later after all the mortising and routing is done.  The extra length is because there are a couple of mortises that get cut only ¼” from the top edge and I want a little extra material the prevent the piece from splitting while they are being cut.

While the mortising and routing of grooves are similar in all the legs, they are not the same as the left and right legs are mirror images.  Also, to match the grain the front and back legs are in sets.  This means each leg only goes in one place.  To keep them straight I write on the top and bottom which corner they end up at plus writing which face gets tapered.  This drawing has all of the needed dimensions for the top of the left front leg.

This drawing has the information needed to lay out the bottom of the left front leg.  Right now, I don’t intend to print out a dimensioned set for each leg but will use this set and make the needed revisions in my head as each leg is marked up.  Well, at least that’s the plan and it may change if problems come up.

Here is the left front leg with the layout all done.  On the left is the outer face.  If you look close you can just make out the taper on the left side.  The center shows the inside face of the leg and the right shows the back or inner face without the taper marked on it.  I don’t normally color in the mortises and slots but did it here for the photo.  One down and three to go.  While layout for this leg took the better part of a couple hours what with double checking everything, I think the others will go much faster.

Here is the way I duplicated the layout.  The board on the right is square with the 2x4 in the vice and acts as a stop to keep the two legs aligned.  A square is used to transfer the layout lines for the top and bottom of the mortises.  Since sides of the mortises are all references off the non-tapered face all I have to do is pull that distance off the drawing and make sure I measure off that face.  It really worked out well even when making the mirror image legs.  Each leg got easier to mark with the last one taking less than 15 minutes.

This close-up is of the left face of the front legs from the photo above.  The bottom leg is the original and the top one is a mirror image.

To make all the mortises I will use my mortising machine rather than cutting them by hand as it really speeds things up.  Besides I don’t enjoy cutting them by hand that much.  The photo on the left is the machine itself while the right photo shows what the specialized drill bit/chisel looks like.

I am going to start with the ½” wide mortises but the last time I used that drill bit/chisel set it was getting dull so it’s time to do a little sharpening.  Below the photo on the top left is before where I have marked the surface to be sharpened with a red magic marker.  The one on the top right is after sharpening and most of the red is gone.  The tool at the bottom is what I use for sharpening.  The interchangeable cone shaped piece is a 600-grit diamond hone.  If the chisel was really in bad shape, I also have a 220 grit one.

Last is touch up the outer face with a leather strop charged with rouge.  The lower part of the chisel is polished to almost a mirror finish.

Next is to work on the drill part.  The photo on the left is before I started and the right is when done.  It had gotten pretty hot as I finished up the last set of mortises and as I remember it was smoking a little on the last one.  Sharpening the cutting edges in it is not like a regular twist bit or most other bits.  The closest is probably a brad point bit.  Two tools are used, first a small fine-tooth file shown at the very bottom and second with the blue handle is a diamond hone.

Once sharpened the bit/chisel can be installed in the mortising machine.  It is a three-step process.  First, they both are slid roughly up into place in the mortising head.  The chisel is then set firmly up against the mortising head using a penny as a spacer and locked in place with the brass screw.  The reasoning for the penny will come later.

Second, the drill bit is pushed up against the bottom of the chisel and tightened in the chuck.

Third, the screw holding the chisel in place is loosened, the penny removed and the chisel is pushed up tight to the mortising head.  Using a small square, the chisel is squared up against the back fence of the moving carriage and the brass screw retightened.  The reason for the penny is to set the needed clearance between the rotating drill and the fixed chisel.  If there is not enough clearance between the bit and the chisel when the motor starts the heat generated by the friction between the bit and the chisel will ruin them both.  One side note the slot in the left face of chisel is where all the chips will come out.  I like to have it face either left or right to allow for plenty of space for the chips to pile up.  If it faces either the front or back the chips can get jammed up against the fence or the clamp.

 Next Up – Leg Mortises Part 1

Greene & Greene End Table - #1 The Beginning

I have always liked Mission and Arts & Crafts furniture.  Back in 2013 I built a Greene & Greene inspired hall table out of cherry and curly maple with ebonized accents.

Before I go on a little history of architects Charles Greene and Henry Greene.  They were born in Ohio, in 1868 and 1870.  As teenagers, the brothers studied at the Manual Training School of Washington University in St. Louis.  They then attended a two-year program at MIT's School of Architecture in 1891 and in 1893 moved to Pasadena CA opening an architectural office focused on residential buildings with an Arts and Crafts aesthetic.  Their unified design of building and furniture with its intricate wood joinery is a demonstration to form and function in Mission and the Arts & Crafts design.

Using my original SketchUp drawing I changed the primary wood from cherry to red oak and did several scaled down versions ending up with two versions having only a couple differences.  One is the top and shelf material being changed from wood to some sort of stone.  The other is changing the curly maple drawer face and panels to another figured wood like Leopardwood or Zebrawood.

Digging through my supply of oak gave me this starting stack of pieces to be used for the over ¾” thick members.  There are other ½” to ¾” thick pieces that will be needed but that material is in the wood rack.

My first step is to break down the 6/4 thick rough sawn planks into surfaced, square and flat pieces.  This plank is about 11 ½” wide but has cupped about 3/16” as it dried out.  Fortunately, it looks like the cup is mostly centered on the plank in a “V” shape rather than a curve.

The solution is to cut down the bottom of that V which is almost at the center of the plank using the circular saw and a guide to get a mostly straight edge.  Here the plank has been securely clamped down, the straight edge in place and the cut made with the circular saw.

After the plank is cut in half the clamps are removed and as the photo below shows there is just a little bit of cup that needs to be removed.

Running the planks through the planer is next.  Fortunately, the planks do not have any twist and only one has any bow and another a little crook.  None of these present any real problem to take care of.  The photo below shows the planer setup with one of the planks on the infeed side of the planer ready for its first pass through.

Below shows the outfeed side and the shop vacuum hooked up.  Out of frame is a control box that has both the planer and vacuum plugged into it.  The control box senses when the planer is turned on and then it starts the vacuum.   That runs until the planer is shut of plus about 10 seconds to clear any chips out of the vacuum line.  The nice thing about this control box is that it can accept power from two different circuits which is needed because the total draw of both the planer and the vacuum would overload the breaker and cause it to trip.  Once the rough-sawn planks are run through the planer I end up with a pretty decent surface that allows me to see if there are any defects that weren’t visible before.  For these there were a few but nothing major. 

The next step is to clean up and flatten the circular saw cut edge.  To find the high spots an 8’ level is set on the edge and a playing card is used to find the gaps between it and the board.  The high spots are marked then a hand plane is used to remove them gradually flattening the edge.  This process is repeated until the edge is pretty flat.  A playing card is about one-hundredth of an inch thick and that’s my out of straight tolerance.  A jointer would do the same job much faster with a lot less elbow grease but I don’t have one as there is a little problem of cost.  A good 8” wide 6’ to 7’ long bed jointer with helical cutterhead would set me back between $1,700 and $2,500 which I don’t have so my 18” long Fore plane gets used and I get a cardio workout.  I do have an electric hand plane that gets used if the edge is really bad but this one wasn’t all that far off.  It took maybe 10 minutes to straighten.

The near end of the board had a little taper of about three-hundredths of an inch that would have required me to plane 90% of the edge down to get the last 10% straight.  Rather than do that I added a spacer consisting of three slices of a playing card held in place with blue tape.  Not to worry, the taper will get cut away in the next step.

To get a parallel edge to my just hand planed edge I use the table saw with a rip blade.  The 8’ level gets clamped to the fence and it acts as a long reference edge that averages out any differences in the hand planed edge so the cut edge is straighter than the one on the board.  Here everything is set up ready to go.  Once this edge is cut the board is rotated end for end, the newly straightened edge is set up against the level and my hand planed edge gets a trim.  That’s because while I can get a pretty straight edge my skill level is not up to also making that edge square to the faces.  One quick pass through the table saw gives me a straight and square edge.

At this point I have a cleaned-up stack of lumber with straight edges and mostly flat faces.  A couple of them have a few areas where the rough sawn surface is still visible but nothing that can’t be easily flattened or worked around when I cut them down into smaller pieces.  This may not be enough for the whole project but I believe it will get me the main thick pieces.  Other thinner parts will come from other stock on hand.

Next Up – Leg Layout & Mortising Machine