To keep the infill panels flush and in the same plane
they will be connected with tongue and groove joints illustrated in the top
drawing. The bottom photo is the setup that's the same process used to make the grooves for the panels to fit into in
the rails. 
Likewise, the tongues to fit in the grooves are made the
same way as the stepped tenons for the ends of the infill panels.
Before a full dry assembly is done there is one more
piece of work needed for the infill panels.
The area I am referring to on the gate is circled in red in the upper
left drawing and enlarged in the lower left drawing. The area highlighted in blue is a gap that
will funnel water down the expansion joint into the dado in the bottom rail and I
don’t want that to happen. The gap is there because the thickness of the tenon that joins the infill panels is narrower than the bottom rail groove. The fix is cut away a small piece of the
tenon that fits into the base rail and add a small filler piece. In
the upper right photo, the bottom rail has been removed to make the cut part of
the tenons visible. The lower right
drawing shows the highlighted filler piece to be glued into the dado in the bottom
rail. This will block the opening in the
panel’s expansion slot yet still allow the infill panels to move in response to
environmental conditions. The block will
get glued in place at the final infill assembly.
Anyway, this is the table saw setup for cutting out the
small piece of the tenon.
Next all the current pieces are dry assembled and clamped
together. At this point final assembly
is getting close although there are still some miscellaneous details to be take
care of.
One of those is to do some light sanding where the stiles
and rails meet to make sure they are absolutely flush. Once that’s done the interior edges get
routed using a small radius bit to soften the interior edges of the stiles and
rails. The top photo shows the router
and bit at an inside corner. One problem
with rounding an inside corner is the routed edge ends up as a curve rather
than a clean intersection of the two radiused edges. That’s shown in the bottom photo and I don’t
like the way it looks. To give a clean
intersection requires some hand work which will be done after the final
assembly is complete when everything is glued together. I’ll cover that process then. The outside edges will also get rounded after
the final glue up.
After disassembling the gates, I decided to do just a
little more work with the router to simplify the hand work discussed above once
the gate is glued together. The left
photo shows the little “horns” where the router bit couldn’t get all the way
into the corner between the rail and the stile.
Once dissembled it’s easy to touch these up as shown in the right photo and
save some handwork later on.
At this point the final assembly glue up can start but
because there are a lot of pieces that need to go together at the same time the
Type III waterproof glue that’s been used so far won’t work. That's because I need a
longer working time than it has. What
will be used is a one-hour epoxy that’s been ordered. In the meantime, the material for Zia’s
applique shown in white in the rendering can be worked on. The vertical bars will have their grain
running vertically just like the panel they will be glued to so they are easy
to make. However, the horizontal bars are different in that to match the vertical grain of the panel they need to be glued up so that the grain runs vertically across the piece’s short dimension and not along
their long dimension. This necessitated gluing up the
short wide panels shown.
Before making the Zia’s components I put together a full-size
mock-up of the Zia on the door made from cardboard. The one on the left being the current design
and a second one where the center element is solid rather than open. My guess was when given the option the
owners would choose the original design and they did. It was a simple task to cut one more
cardboard piece to make sure since seeing an object full size in person does
not always look just like the drawing. 
Cutting all the blanks for the Zia’s is up next and there
are a lot of blanks to be cut. Each Zia
has 16 individual bars plus the center circle so that’s 17 pieces per Zia and
there are four of them so it’s 68 pieces total.
Using the previously glued-up blanks for the short cross grain group I
cut the 16 required plus a handful of extras for testing and in case there were
problems. Same thing for the longer
pieces. Here are the finished stacks not
including the four pieces for the center circles.
There was one unexpected problem with one of the long
boards in that it decided to warp when making the next to last cut to give me a
pretty good curve. Fortunately, the
last piece was wide enough for an easy fix.
Process is to cut the curved piece into rough lengths which reduced to
amount of curve per piece to a manageable amount. Next is to run pieces through table saw with
high end points against the fence cutting off the curve and giving me one
straight edge. Last, is to flip the
board so the new straight edge is against the fence and cut the piece to final
width. That said, I will let the pieces
sit to see if they are going to move or are now stable.
Next Up – Making Zia Parts & Installing 1st Infill Panel
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