Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Sticks to Structure

Ok back again.
Last time the mortise making on the rail side was done. Now the leg side.
I normally like to keep my leg blanks square for joinery when I can. The front two legs are to be at angles pinching into the desk and need to get angles planed in where the drawer pocket meets the leg. This would be unnecessary if the desk was square, or I had put a visual space and made drawers to come out a little away from the leg.
At any rate I need to cut some of the profile to allow those little juts to become the angles I need.

Started by taking the angle off my shop drawing with my little bevel gauge. The square is to check for squareness relative to the end grain, aka top of the leg.

Then a whirl wind of angled mortise making happened at the boring machine where I was too wrapped up to stop for photos it seems.
This however is the last part of that whirl wind. The dowels is where the drawer pocket partition meets the back apron. I used dowels because normal mortises would have been all cross on end grain which doesn't help too much and the partition is too thin for lateral tenons... dowels was the answer.
That is one full corner of joinery!

Woot! A skeleton of a desk emerges.
Getting to this point was a big relief. I stood back to study it a bit and couldn't find much energy to do much else for the moment. Hopefully the scariest part is over, hopefully.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looks good Nick, What kind of leg shape you going with? Also impressed with two blog posts so close together.

Just since I'm in the market now, did you make your bench or buy it. I'm leaning towatd just pulling the trigger on a new one?

Nicholas Nelson said...

Well after mocking up the legs it struck me that they look very much like the legs on Daisuke's desk (who was my bench mate)... go figure heh.

I made my bench. Yes it takes time, but benches also cost money. When I came back I had more time than money of course ;). Also I could make whatever I wanted. I didn't like the trough, and wanted something bigger.
Furthermore by making my own bench I could only blame myself if something didn't quite turn out.
The scale and bulk of work I don't particularly like to do but "if I could do it all over" I'd still build my bench :).

Nick Brygidyr said...

whats up with that funky ledge on the leg? gettin' jiggy with it? ;)

Nicholas Nelson said...

Ha take a closer look at the put together pic.
Too difficult to describe clearly. If nothing else, you'll see heh.

Jeff Branch said...

Really cool - especially the third photo. One of these days I'll decide to make something a little more complex like that joint.