With all the pieces except for the top and the shelf ready to finish I can consider how that’s going to be done. The pegs, handle and maybe the ebonized cross supports will be done with the airbrush. They are small and using the airbrush will work well. The base is bigger than anything I have used the airbrush for and smaller than anything I have used the HVLP sprayer on. The upper part with the veneered panels and the drawer will work well with the HVLP sprayer. However, when spraying the lower rails, legs and spindles I am concerned about the amount of overspray that will occur. These pieces are only a couple of inches or less wide and the spray fan of the HVLP sprayer is about a foot. That translates into a lot of wasted finish and atomized lacquer floating around the shop.
In the meantime, I sprayed three coats of lacquer on the
smaller pieces including the cross supports with the airbrush. The reason they get finished first is that I
want to give the lacquer time to cure and harden. They are all a slight interference fit and
will be installed using a clamp to press them into place. The extra curing time for hardening is to
reduce the chance of the finish getting damaged during the install.
With the small parts lacquered I moved back to working on
the top by trimming the adjoining center faces of the two-board glue-ups to
their final size. I will leave the outer
edges a little wide just in case there is a problem with the center glue joint. Here the two halves of the top are glued and
clamped together.
While the top glue joint was curing, I started on the
shelf by selecting a board long and wide enough to make the four-piece
shelf. It’s almost always easier to get
a good flow of grain if a single board is used.
In the original plan the shelf had breadboard ends and ebony inserts
like the drawing below. However, as the
project has progressed, I now think that because the piece is scaled down from
the original that’s going to be a bit too busy and will probably delete them
both. The bottom photo shows each half
glued up from two boards.
Once the glue cured, I trimmed the edges that will make
the center joint in the completed shelf and did a test clamping before gluing
them together. Unfortunately, when
checking the joint there was a small gap in the center. This puzzled me in that the longer joint in
the top went together just fine and I had followed the same process with the
shelf pieces. Thinking that maybe there
was a problem I adjusted the saw to take just a skim cut thinking that might
resolve the problem to no avail. The gap
was still there. Leaving the fence
unchanged I ran the pieces through the saw to see if that might clean things up
and it didn’t. Rather than try another
pass through the saw it was time to try a different approach. Taking the flattest surface in the shop which
is the table saw top an 80-grit strip of sandpaper used in the thickness sander
gets clamped to the saw and tucked under the rip fence as shown in the photo
below.
A pencil line is drawn on the offending edge to track
progress and the piece is held up against the fence to keep the edge square
then it’s pushed along the sand paper until the line is gone indicating a truly
flat surface. 
Just in case the fence is not absolutely square with the
table one piece had the show face of the shelf held against the fence and the
other piece had the show face held away from the fence. That way if there is any error it would be
cancelled out. This photo shows an X at
the glue joint on the top face.
That did the trick giving me a perfect joint with no gap
at all. A little glue, some clamps and
the shelf is glued together. The shelf’s
outer edges still need to be trimmed to bring it to final width once the glue
cures. It’s left a bit oversize in case
an unforeseen problem comes up during the gluing. It is also long enough to not use the
breadboard ends and ebony splines. If I
decide that it does need that detail then it can always be cut down.
With the glue cured on both the top and shelf panels they
were run through the thickness sander to do any minor flattening moving to
finer grits until ending with 120 grit paper.
That’s followed by ripping to final width by taking a little off both
edges so the outer boards are the same width.
Last is to cut to length. Because
the panels are too wide to be cut on the chop saw the table saw and sled shown
below is used.
Here is the shelf and top cut to final width and
length. I think the grain matching came
out pretty well. Each panel is made up
of four different boards. Can you find
the joints?
The top will have breadboard ends and while there are a
number of ways to attach the ends to the center panel, I have narrowed it down
to two. Both have a groove in the
breadboard that goes over a matching tongue on the center section along with
exposed splines where the breadboard and center panel meet. The difference is in the way the breadboard
is attached to the center panel. Option
A, shows the breadboard attached using dowels from below up through slots in
the tongue but not all the through the breadboard. The top photo below is a regular view and the
bottom one is an X-ray version.
Option B, does away with the dowels and uses screws
installed through the end of the breadboard and run into the center panel then
plugged with face grain plugs. 
The center screw will go through a pilot hole to fix the location of the breadboard while the outer screws will go through slots. That’s because the breadboard grain runs 90 degrees to the grain in the center panel and there will be differential movement when the humidity changes. Because of that differential movement only the center couple of inches of the breadboard/center panel will be glued together.
Next Up – Top Tongue & Groove Plus Routing Spline Pocket & Starting Splines
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