Euro Cherry leg joinery

The stand has been going pretty well. I don't want to jinx it but I might say pretty smoothly considering all the non-planer angles and "crammed" joinery. Here we are at the horizontal motiser with xy again. The mortises for the legs are set up with stop blocks, height shim, depth shims, and angled leg support. I don't remember the last time I actually used notes on an operation but there was a fair amount going on here... Three different mortise depths, haunched mortises, what shim goes in what order as they are different sizes, and I needed to aim at certain sides of my lines due to refitting the shoulders afterwards.


So for the long stretcher side the haunched hole was bored first. It goes the middle depth to make it past the haunch shoulder but not into the overlapping tenon.


Here is the single shim for the haunch.


The the remaining shoulder portion of the tenon was bored.


Add a shim for the shoulder.


Last the overlapping mortise was bored with no shim to go the full depth of the end mill bit.




Fast forward the fitting of the "loose tenons" and this is was the the joint looks like, pulled apart a bit as to see what's going on. By the way the laminated stretcher is just a bit under 3/4" thick. The tenons are 5/32" thick.


After fine tuning the fit of the legs to the stretchers with the tenons in place (yep it seems as though these structures need to be fit after everything you add for a precise fit) I went to the dowels that will go into the cabinet and the leg.
This is a little single dowel jig that I used with a hand held power drill.


The stretchers were placed with legs to the cabinet, clamped down and the legs removed. Dowel center finders put in the holes and legs loaded once again to lightly press into the center finders. I would normally press the finders more firmly but I am looking for a draw-pin action here. SO, the legs are then taken off and light center marks found. I used a awl to remark the dowel ever so slightly to the inside of the original mark. The off center mark will draw the leg into the side of the joint.
Now the a bulk of the nit-picky (yet pretty enjoyable) part is done... it's shaping time!!! (for the stretchers and legs)