Greene & Greene End Table - #5 Front/Back Rails Part 1

After running one of the planks through the surfacer to bring it down to just ¹/₁₆” over the target thickness I ran it through the thickness sander loaded with 100 grit paper to smooth out the surface.  A change to 150 grit and a couple of passes gave me the board for the bottom rails.  Below are the four pieces laid out on it and as you can see, I did have some problems to work around.  The bottom photo is a closer view.  In it there are some numbered dashed lines.  That’s the cut lines and their sequence for breaking the plank down.

This is the result after being cut apart on the bandsaw.  The top edge on all four pieces is the plank’s original straight edge.  That edge will be used to rip the pieces cleaning up the bandsaw cut while they are being cut close to their final width.

These pieces are then ripped to final width on the table saw and cut to final length using the chop saw. 

That’s followed by laying out the cuts needed to size the tenons.  They will be cut using a stack dado blade on the table saw.  The top photo shows the setup for the bottom of the front/back rail.  The first pass establishes the shoulder of the tenon.  More passes are made to remove the stub toward the fence.  Couple of things to note.  First I use a combination of dado blades to give a ⁵/₈” wide cut.  The cut could have been made wider but adding more blades increases the spun weight and the amount of material removed in each pass.  As the tenon is too long to cut in one pass and two is pushing it I decided to make the stack so it could easily be done in three.  The second thing is the scrap of plywood behind the oak rail.  That’s there to prevent any chipping when the dado blade exits the back side of the cut.

Because the tenon is not centered on the blank the top is a much deeper cut.  The method is the same it’s just a deeper cut.  This photo shows what the finished cutout looks like.

The last set of cuts establish the cheeks of the tenon.  For these two pieces I had to clamp an extension board to the crosscut fence.  That’s because of the notch in the bottom of the rail which came about as a result of nesting the rails together when cut from the original plank.  I felt that the reference edge on the rail was too short to be steady.  Adding the extension board allows me to use both ends of the rail for reference.  Making the cut is not hard but the setup is time consuming since once both faces are cut the remaining piece needs to fit snugly in the ½” mortise that has been cut in the leg.  The tolerance between a perfect fit and too tight or too loose is only a few thousands of an inch.  To dial this in I set the dado blade just a little shy of what I want then using a test piece make small adjustments to the blade’s depth of cut to sneak up on the fit.  Because passes are made on both sides of the tenon any change in blade depth is doubled.

Because the rails vary a few thousands of an inch in thickness the tenons do too.  That requires a little help with a shoulder plane to bring a couple of the tenons down to the right size for that snug fit.  It did not take long to do the fitting, probably less than a minute for each tenon.  The shoulder plane shown is a little different that most planes.  That’s because the blade goes all the way to the outer edges of the body of the plane.  This allows it to get into corners like where the cheek or wide face of tenon meets the shoulder.

After the tenons are fitted a pair of notches are cut in each rail that will be used to support the lower shelf as shown circled in the drawing below.  They are made using the same ⁵/₈” wide dado set I used to cut the tenons with the depth reset to ³/16” deep.

Now it’s over to the band saw to rough cut the rail’s upper offsets.  The lower offset will be cut later once some more mortises are cut.  Below you can see where I got close to my final line, most of the time about ¹/16” or so away.  The inside curves have a little bit more as I can’t turn that sharp with the ½” blade in use and it’s not worth taking the time to change it.

After a little work with the disk sander to even out the straight parts yet still leaving it just a little oversize I move to the oscillating drum sander with a coarse sleeve to bring everything together fairing the transition between the straight part and the curves.  Getting a good smooth straight edge is done by clamping a guide to the sander then adjusting it so when the rail is held tight to it the drum is aligned with the line.  When everything is cleaned up the coarse drum is replaced with a finer grit and the process repeated.  Final smoothing will be done later by hand sanding.

With the upper rail offsets 95% done each one gets a mortise cut for a tenon at the end of the four spindles highlighted in the drawing below.

The mortises are cut the same way as all the others so I won’t go into that again but once cut on the mortising machine there is a little more work to do because they are stopped or don’t go all the way through and will remain that way.  The top photo below shows an example of what a stopped mortise looks like cut in half.  In it you can see where the drill bit/chisel leaves some material at the bottom that needs to be removed.  In this case only about half of what’s left needs to be cut out in order to get the full depth of the tenon to fit.  It’s a fairly simple process of taking a chisel and chopping it down.  The bottom photo shows the rail in the vice, the chisel in the mortise and the mallet used.

Next Up – Front/Back Rails Part 2 & Side Rails