My next step is ripping to rough thickness the upper
front/back and side rails along with the front and back spindle pieces to
their rough width and crosscut a little long.
Those pieces are shown in the left drawing below. Because a couple of the boards are pretty
close in total width to what’s needed, I decided to use a thin kerf rip saw
blade. The right photo below shows the
difference between a regular and thin kerf blade. It may not look like a lot but over several
cuts it adds up.
This is a typical setup where the cut width is set about
1/32” wide. That little extra allows me
to run the pieces though the thickness sander to bring them down to the exact
thickness and sanded smooth with 220 grit paper.
Here are the roughly sized blanks ready for their tenons,
grooves, offsets, dados and the like to be cut.
They will sit overnight to see if there is any wood movement before I
start that work tomorrow.
After an overnight rest the blanks showed no movement so
I could move on to using the thickness sander to bring them down to their final
dimension sanded to a pretty smooth surface with 220 grit paper. This photo shows the sander with its top open
and a strip of 120 grit paper mostly loaded.
To finish loading the end still has to be set in a spring clamp which
applies a constant tension to the sandpaper keeping it flat and in place.
Last step is to group all the same thickness pieces
together and mark their faces with a pencil.
The crosshatching is used to give me visual confirmation of flattening
since when the pencil marks are all gone the pieces faces are flat. These pieces all need to be brought down to
1” thick.
After bringing the pieces down to a less than 1/32” too
thick the 120-grit paper is changed out to 220-grit and the final passes are
made to smooth out the surface and get them down to final thickness. Here is one set of pieces after the final
pass. They just happen to be 1” square. The others vary in thickness at either 7/8”
or 1 5/16”. 
The 1” square front/back rails above and below the drawer
are shown in the top drawing are the first parts I will start on as they start
out as the same size blank. The top and
bottom of the front set is identical as is the back set but the front/back sets
while similar are not quite identical with the front having a stopped groove
while the back set groove runs full length.
Process starts by cutting a ½” tenon to fit into the legs
as that’s the same for all four rails.
The same stack dado is used as with the other tenons so I won’t go into
much detail. Here is the table saw
setup. Once the tenon had been fitted to
the mortise the cutting was easy with no change in setup as the rails are all
square and the same amount is taken off each side.
I did have one small problem when cutting the second
rail. One corner chipped out (circled in
red) when the tenon was cut as shown below in the top photo. That wasn’t really a big problem as the rails
had not been cut to length yet so all I had to do was trim 3/8” off the end of
the tenon and recut it as shown in the bottom photo.
After all the tenons on one end had been cut, the rails
are cut to final length and the other end’s tenons cut. Next is to cut some dados in the rails where
the finished spindles will fit into.
This drawing shows how the spindles will fit into the to be cut rail’s
dados.
Laying out those dados is next. Like I did with the legs one of the rails
gets carefully marked which is used as a template for the others layout. These dados are the last bit of work that’s
the same on all four rails. Once these
are done the work diverges into front and back rails.
Cutting the dados requires two passes with the dado
stack. This photo shows the completed
dado after the second pass. The drawing
calls for a 7/8” wide dado which is just what the finished cut ended up
being. However, I did leave myself a
little room for error when I ran the spindles through the thickness
sander. They were left 1/64” too thick
just in case I overshot the dado. Now
it’s a simple task of running those pieces through the sander for an exact fit
before I start work on them once I get these rails done.
There is just one more set of cuts to make on the
rails. It is a groove where the
decorative panels will go in. The
drawing below shows front and back views.
Curly maple is shown but I still haven’t made up my mind on what I will
really use.
All the grooves will be cut on the router table. The difference is the front rails have just a short groove at each end while the back groove runs the full length. I started by laying out the short one then doing a test assembly to make sure things lined up before making the cut. Well, it’s a good thing that I checked before cutting as the new groove did not line up where it was supposed to be. What I wanted is shown on the left drawing where the groove in the rail lines up with the groove in the leg. However, what I would have gotten had I routed the groove is shown in the right drawing and that won’t work. Doing some checking I found that I had pulled the wrong dado depth dimension off the drawing. Very fortunately for me is that the dado is too shallow rather than too deep so it just needed to be recut 1/8” deeper. Somewhat easier said than done since the deeper dado has to line up exactly with the existing one. It did take some time, multiple test cuts with very small incremental adjustments to reset the table saw fence but it did work out. Got to say I am really glad I did the test assembly after layout and before routing or it could have been a lot worse.
Next Up – Finishing Rail Milling
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