Greene & Greene End Table - #4 Leg Mortises Part 2 & Rail Templates

The next to last pair of mortises are the ones for the two top side rails.  They are a little different in that the long dimension runs across the leg rather than lengthwise.  The drawing on the left below shows these mortises circled in red.  The photo on the right shows the first setup in the mortising machine with all the stops set.  One hole has been cut and I am ready to cut the second one.  Since the carriage only has stops for left/right travel all the cuts closest to the fence have to be cut before the front/back travel can be adjusted.  To reuse the left/right stops for the mirror legs the chisel is used to locate the leg in the correct position then the black rod now on the right is moved to the left side of the carriage and set.

Once all the first cuts are done the carriage is moved so the remaining part of the mortise can be cut as shown below. 

The last mortises require a bit/chisel change from ½” to ³/₈”.  They are for plugs that will hide the screws used to lock the various rails in place.  The drawing on the left shows the four plugs and their mortises while the two photos on the right show the two different setups in the mortising machine.

Here is what the left and right front legs look like with all the mortises cut.  The left two are from the front and the right two are from the back.

Next is to route a couple of grooves in each leg where the panels will go.  Here is the setup at the router table.  The groove gets cut between the two through mortises on the side of the leg.  I added blue tape with a line to identify the leg end’s starting and ending points for cutting the grooves.

This is what the finished groove looks like and because it is centered on the leg there is no difference between the mirror image legs.  You can also see the other groove that has to be done but because it is off-set one pair of legs needs to be flipped and different start/stop marks are required.

With both sets of grooves made here is what the pair of legs that go in the front of the table look like viewed from the inside of the table.

With all the mortising and routing done on the legs it’s time to taper them.  That’s done on a tapering jig I made some years ago.  It has a capture piece that is clamped to the table saw fence which holds and guides the sled.  A movable plate on the sled sets the angle and two clamps hold the leg in place for the pass through the saw.  Here it is setup so the cut is about ¹/₁₆” oversize.  A light second cut set to the final size cleans up any burns.  Note that the wide end of the waste piece is at the back of the jig.  If the thin end were at the back, you run the risk of it falling down and getting trapped between the blade and the insert which is not what you want. 

This photo is after the first pass is made along with the cutoff.  With the taper cut you can also see that the two stopped mortises closest to the saw blade are now through mortises.

While the legs still need their edges rounded over with the router and cut to length, they will be set aside for now while the lower rails are worked on.  This photo shows what each of the four faces look like.

The top drawing below shows the legs plus the side and front/back rails while the lower two drawings show the rail dimensions.  As you can see there are a lot of dimensions on the pieces required to locate all the tenons, tapers, offsets, notches and rounded edges plus a few more mortises.

I could painstakingly transfer all those dimensions onto each of the four rails which would take quite a while.  In addition, doing that increases the chance of error when laying out the pieces whose ends have a lot going on and need to be identical.  My solution is to use the electronic 3D SketchUp drawing and print out at full scale the ends of the rails.  They are then glued to a piece of ¼” thick plywood with spray adhesive.

Cutting the parallel edges are done on the table saw and the ends are trimmed with the chop saw.  After that the offsets, rounded edges and taper are cut close to finished size using a jig saw with a fine-tooth blade.  I used the jig saw rather than the band saw to get a better cut as the ½” wide 4 tooth per inch blade on the bandsaw would have given me pretty rough splintered edge.  That could be prevented by swapping out the blade to a smaller higher tooth count one.  However, it would have taken longer to do the blade swap and reset the saws guides than it took me to make the cuts with the jig saw.

Next using the disk sander, I smoothed out the taper, rounded edges and the offsets.  It works best with straight edges and outside curves, not so well with inside curves.  The grit is pretty coarse, rapidly removes material leaving a fairly rough edge so it is an intermediate step.

Moving on to the oscillating drum sander which has a drum smaller than the inside radius and a fine grit sleeve installed the edges are smoothed and brought right down to their final size.  This unit has six different sized drums from ³/₈” to 3” giving a lot of flexibility.

The last step is to use 220 grit sandpaper along with a sanding block to finish up the edges making sure all the transitions between the curves and flat edges are smooth and flowing.  Later on, these will be used to mark up the rail ends for cutting on the bandsaw and maybe as a template guiding the router.

Next Up – Front/Back Rails Part 1