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Thread: Let's Build Something Together

  1. #16
    Great thread, keem 'em coming. I want to build something like this out of inexpensive wood and these are great tips.

  2. #17
    Join Date
    Sep 2005
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    Quote Originally Posted by Robert Rozaieski View Post
    After cutting the pieces to length, I shoot the ends to square them up.
    Part 2. That is a relief to see!

    I'm in the small minority that reads these forums in threaded or hybrid mode and this one appears out of order there. I didn't notice the part numbers in the post titles, and, reading in the order they were in in hybrid mode, I thought you were going straight from cutting to length to scribing the lines for your dovetails. I was thinking "this guy is a LOT better with his crosscut saw than I am (probably true, but still...), or he is pretty sloppy."<g>

    I echo the comments of others--this is a very helpful thread. It's helpful to observe someone doing quality work like this. Thanks for taking the time to document it.

  3. #18
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    I'm really enjoying this thread, Robert. Keep up the good work.

    Mark

  4. #19

    Cabinet Build Part 7


    I've placed the assembled case on the bench face up and positioned the right stile and top and bottom rails on the case with a very slight overhang, maybe 1/32". I then mark the position of the bottom of the bottom rail and the top of the top rail onto the right stile. These two marks establish the final length of the stiles.


    I've removed the bottom rail here so you can see the mark. It almost looks like there is no overhang at all but there is. Once again it was done by feel. The rails and stiles will be planed flush to the case after the face frame has been glued to the case. Therefore, I wanted the overhang to be minimal so that I don't have to plane much to flush it up and so the overall look of the face frame dimensions won't change.


    I've put the case aside and clamped the right stile to the left stile with the inside edges facing up. I'm now squaring the final stile length and transfering this length across both stiles in order to ensure identical layout on both stiles. This will ensure the face frame is square when assembled. On the face frame parts, my datum edges and faces are the inside edges where the door will be inset and the front faces. All of my gauging is done off of these reference faces/edges.


    Here, I've laid the bottom rail across the two stiles, marked the width of the rail, removed the rail and squared that width across both stiles. I repeated this at the other end of the stiles with the top rail.


    I mark the mortise length by eye with my square and marking knife. I highlighted the mortise length here with a mechanical pencil but the lines were scribed with a knife first. This gives a positive reference for your mortise chisel when performing the final paring of the mortise ends later.


    Use the chisel you will use to make the mortise to set the width of the points on your mortise gauge. I set the fence of the mortise gauge to mark the mortise approximately centered on the stile stock. I do this by eye. Don't lose this setting after marking the mortises as we will use the exact same setting to mark the corresponding tenons. Since we will be referencing the gauge fence off of the same reference face (the front face) on every mortise and tenon, it doesn't matter if the mortises and tenons are not exactly centered on the stock. The mortises and tenons will all match up since they will all be the same distance from the front face of the face frame. See how important those reference marks are now ?


    The sides of the mortises are now marked. I've highlighted them here again with mechanical pencil just to make the marks clear. It really isn't necessary to use the pencil at all as the gauge marks are typically enough. If your eyesight isn't so good anymore, the pencil highlights can be helpful though .

  5. #20

    Cabinet Build Part 8


    This is my setup for mortising. The handscrew clamp holds the work steady and keeps it from tipping side to side and the holdfast holds the handscrew to the bench. The work is easily removed from the handscrew for clearing of chips and flipping around to do the other side or change pieces without removing the handscrew from the holdfast. The mortise being cut is placed over top of the leg of the bench so that any mallet blows are supported firmly all the way to the floor and not just by the bench top, although I won't be using a mallet on these particular mortises.


    I start my mortises in the center by removing a wedge. The first cut is bevel down from one side a little offset from center. You want your first two cuts to meet at about the middle of the mortise. Again, since this Eastern white pine is so soft, I just cut my mortises with paring pressure. I did not need to use a mallet. I find that pared mortises in pine are cleaner and more accurate. Pounding with a mallet in this soft wood tends to drive the chisel off course, at least for me. I'm not that good at making mortises. In fact, if you want to learn to hand cut dovetails, learn to hand cut mortise and tenon joints first. I think these are far harder to get right by hand than dovetails.


    Here's the second mortise cut from the other side, again made bevel down. Note the wedge shaped chip removed. Continue removing material in this fassion, alternating sides and meeing in the middle, until your mortise is full depth at the middle. Once you have the mortise depth established, you pare back the ends until you reach your scribed end marks. The final paring cut is perfectly vertical, with the bevel facing the center of the mortise, and the chisel edge in the scribed line defining the end of the mortise.


    Here's the final cut. I used the length of the primary bevel on my mortise chisel to define the depth of these mortises. My mortise chisel is ground with a very shallow primary bevel (about 20 degrees) so the bevel is long enough to define the depth of these mortises (maybe about 1-1/4"). If I need a deeper or shallower mortise, I'll put a piece of masking tape on the chisel to define the depth.


    Here's the finished mortise. Making mortises in this way is very satisfying and can be very fast, especially in this soft wood. I think it took me about 30 minutes to cut all 4 mortises, including taking the pictures. If I wasn't stopping to setup the photo, I could probably do these mortises in about 5 minutes each. Harder wood would take a little longer, maybe 10 minutes each.
    Last edited by Robert Rozaieski; 04-03-2008 at 9:13 AM.

  6. #21
    Join Date
    Jan 2006
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    Nice project and great thread Robert. Keep the pictures coming.

    Jonathan


    "I left Earth three times. I found no place else to go. Please take care of Spaceship Earth." -- Wally Schirra, who flew around Earth on Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions in the 1960s.

  7. #22

    Cabinet Build Part 9

    I apologize for the following pictures. In my haste to upload them to the photo server, I forgot to edit them to make them brighter first, so they may be a little darker than the previous ones. My shop isn't the best environment for taking pictures so they don't always come out the best.


    I've arranged the face frame parts on the case again, this time to mark the position of the tenon shoulders on the bottom rail.


    Now the position of the tenon shoulders is squared across both rails simultaneously to ensure that the rails will have the exact same distance between tenon shoulders. Once again, this ensures a square face frame assembly.


    I then gauge the mortise depth off each mortise and use the shallowest gauged depth, minus a small amount for clearance and to provide a reservoir in the mortise bottom for excess glue to flow into.


    The gauged tenon length is then added to each shoulder and this mark scribed across the rail. These scribe marks establish the finished rail length, including the tenons.


    Here's the result. The scribe on the left is the shoulder of the tenon. The scribe on the right is the tenon length. The material to the right of the tenon length scribe is waste and will be sawn away before any more tenon layout is done.

  8. #23

    Cabinet Build Part 10


    After the rails are cut to final length, mark each tenon for height. This dimension is taken directly from the tenons' mating mortises'. They will likely not be the same for each tenon so scribe them each separately. This ensures an accurate fit of each tenon to it's mating mortise, but also means that if you mix the parts up, they likely won't fit together correctly. Yet another reason to mark all your parts and reference faces/edges clearly .


    After transferring the tenon height to each tenon, use a marking gauge to transfer this height around all three sides from shoulder to shoulder. Simply set the gauge pin into the scribe mark, slide the fence against the stock and scribe around the tenon. You will have to reset the gauge twice for each tenon for a total of 8 times. DO NOT USE THE SAME GAUGE YOU USED TO MARK THE MORTISE SIDES ! Remember, that gauge is still set to the width and more importantly the offset of the mortise sides and that exact same measurement will be needed to scribe the tenon thickness, so use a different gauge to scribe the tenon heights.


    The finished tenon height scribed on each piece will look like this.


    NOW, pick up you other gauge that has the tenon thickness and offset already set. Use this gauge to scribe from shoulder to shoulder along the edges to establish the tenon thickness. This gauge setting will be the same for all four tenons as it was set to the width of the mortise chisel used to make the mortise. As with all other gauging and scribing, only run the gauge fence on a reference face or edge.


    Finally, the tenon layout is complete. Believe me, it takes a lot longer to write about and read this than it actually takes to do it. All four tenons were layed out in just a couple minutes. Sorry, this is a bad picture.
    Last edited by Robert Rozaieski; 04-03-2008 at 10:21 AM.

  9. #24

    Cabinet Build Part 11


    To saw the tenons, we begin with the shoulder cuts. Start on a face, saw to depth, rotate the stock 90 degrees, saw to depth, rotate 90 degrees, saw, rotate, saw. By rotating as you saw, rather than say sawing the two face shoulders first then sawing the two edge shoulders, you have a place to start your saw on each side (i.e. the previous cut). This ensures a continuous shoulder around the entire tenon and prevents one shoulder cut from not lining up with another, requiring you to then attempt to pare them even with a chisel. This is one of the tricks to going from the saw to assembly without requiring any adjustment of the joint. Of course, you need to have nice deep knife lines defining your tenon shoulders for this to work easily. So put the pencil down and pick up a knife .


    After the shoulders are cut, then make the cheek cuts. I make the long cheek cuts first as these are more critical to the joint than the edge cuts. Saw down both lines (end grain scribe and edge scribe) at the same time. When both cheeks have been sawn off, then saw the edge cheeks off.


    This is the finished tenon. If all goes well, you should be able to assemble the tenons in their mating mortises with no more than firm hand pressure (PUT THE MALLET DOWN ). If necessary use a wide chisel to lightly pare the offending cheek of a thick tenon. You can also use plane shavings to shim a loose tenon, but don't tell anyone I told you so .


    Finally, dry assemble the face frame. Everything goes together with firm hand pressure and is nice and square. You can't ask for any more than that.

  10. #25
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    Robert,
    Your thinking of M&T being harder than DT's by hand is welcome "music" to my ears. I've become pretty proficient at M&T by hand and have yet to try DT's...... Guess there's one more thing on the list for "one of these days".
    Thanks for taking the time to put this kind of thread together. I'll never be a true Neander, but I'm adding more of this style of work into my hybrid shop and methods.

    Cheers,
    Greg

  11. #26
    Quote Originally Posted by Greg Cole View Post
    Robert,
    Your thinking of M&T being harder than DT's by hand is welcome "music" to my ears. I've become pretty proficient at M&T by hand and have yet to try DT's...... Guess there's one more thing on the list for "one of these days".
    Thanks for taking the time to put this kind of thread together. I'll never be a true Neander, but I'm adding more of this style of work into my hybrid shop and methods.

    Cheers,
    Greg
    Greg,
    Glad you are enjoying it.

    It may be just me but I do believe hand cut M&T is harder than hand cut dovetail to do well. M&T requires longer straighter cuts to have a joint fit properly and you can't really fudge it by compressing the tenon as the mortise sides are usually too thin. Dovetails on the other hand are relatively short cuts and you can make up for an error cutting one part of the joint since you scribe the other part directly from the first part (whether you do pins or tails first).

    If you drive a too fat tenon into a mortise, you will split out the mortise side. In a dovetail joint, especially when one wood is a softer wood like in a drawer construction, you can compress a slightly fat piece and it will look real nice and tight (though you can still split the joint if you're not careful). With dovetails, you also have a much stronger mechanical connection so if it fits a little loose or you have a small gap in a tail, the joint will still hold. Not so with M&T. In order to get this kind of mechanical connection with M&T you need to peg your joints (which I will do and show with this one) or cut through mortises and wedge the tenon (which I will do with the cabinet door for this project).

    Another plus with dovetails is that in a lot of traditional construction, dovetails get covered with moldings so you won't ever even see a small gap that has been shimmed. On the other hand, most M&T is right there for you to see, i.e. table apron to leg joint, cabinet door frame, cabinet face frame. If there are gaps at the shoulders of these joints, they are blatantly obvious and stick out like a sore thumb, and while a tenon's thickness can be shimmed, if there are gaps at the shoulder, the only fix is to shorten the sholder to shoulder length by adjusting the shoulders with a plane or chisel. This could ruin a piece if it changes the final dimensions of the assembly too much (e.g. inset cabinet door becomes too narrow leaving a large gap). Again, maybe it's just that I have a harder time with M&T versus dovetails, but that has been my experience.

    I think the biggest problem that people have with hand cut dovetails is that the joint has become more than a way to hold two pieces together. It has become an art form; an asthetic accent to a piece of furniture if you will. So much so that a lot of people will choose other construction methods if they cannot produce a perfect dovetail, even if those methods are not as strong or appropriate for the application. People who don't know any better will look at a piece of furniture and if they see dovetails they will immediately assume it is a high quality piece, even though these days this very often isn't the case. When the joint first came into vogue, it was just another way to mechanically hold two pieces of wood together that didn't depend on glue strength/longevity, not the decorative element that it has become today.

    Personally, I'd rather focus on the overall look of the piece; the first impressions if you will. Is it proportioned well? Do the legs look too fat? Too thin? Too Curvy? Too Straight? Are the drawers all the same size or do they graduate from bottom to top? Do the moldings fit the piece or do they look out of place? Do the drawers and doors fit well or are there large uneven gaps around them? A piece could have the most beautiful and perfect dovetails ever cut by man, but if the rest of the piece is junk, it doesn't matter much. Chances are, you won't even see the dovetails the majority of the time. I mean how often does a piece sit in a room with it's drawers wide open? I like nice dovetails, but the other aspects of the piece are much more important to me.

    Wow, that was a lot of rambling . Sorry for being so long winded .

    Sorry I don't have more to post today. Didn't get a chance to work on it last night. Hopefully I'll get some time tonight after the kids are in bed. The plan is to drawbore and peg the face frame tenons, make and fit the shelves and possibly attach the face frame to the case. But we'll see . You never know. Hopefully I'll have more to add tonight or tomorrow morning. We're getting DSL installed today . Finally out of the dark ages!

    Bob

  12. #27
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    Jan 2005
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    St Thomas, Ont.
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    Talking

    I am enjoying this very much thanks Robert.

    I concur with you that mortice and tenon joints are much harder to do than dovetails. The last project I did was a closet organizer and it required when done sixty two mortice and tenon joints. I was getting pretty good towards the end at chopping the mortices out.

    For some reason it never occurred to me to saw the tenon shoulders the way you did, but it makes perfect sense, so I learned something.

    As to dovetails I have said this before but I have seen a lot of 150 year old pine kitchen cupboards with less than perfect dovetails and they are still holding together. In fact I can do better dovetails (most of the time) than a lot of the antiques.
    Craftsmanship is the skill employed in making a thing properly, and a good craftsman is one who has complete mastery over his tools and material, and who uses them with skill and honesty.

    N. W. Kay

  13. #28
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    Robert,
    Thanks for the long reply. I tend to wind on & on when I post too... see I'm starting out rambling?
    Anyway, your words are encouranging. I think you're right about the "mystique" factor that's put on DT's, especially the hand cut variety. I've done some DT's on an incremental positioner via a router, but that limits the width of the board. I've condisered a 24" DT jig, but can't get over the $ for such a specialized gizmo.
    I've had my trials and trivulations with learning M & T. I've blown out some ends, sides and the like (put the mallet down for dry fit & get out the shoulder plane!). So I used my noodle and surfed the net for some guidance, and reading how to means more after failing miserably a few times. Like just about everything else in life, I seem to go after the hardest first, whether I know it at the time or not. So DT's will be a breeze! LOLOL
    I have plans (well working on them) for a proper work bench, the set up I have now is a "jack of all" bench that isn't really conducive to Neander work. I am telling myself learning DT's will come after that (as always I have more things to do that time to do them).
    Talk of a workbench brings lasagne to mind now, thanks James.

    Greg

  14. #29
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    Anytime Greg anytime. I have to confess though we had company last Saturday and we bought the lasagna. Got caught short and did not have time to make it, so we went to a good Italien bakery which makes their own noodles etc, so not bad, just not homemade.

    Confession is good for the soul they say.
    Craftsmanship is the skill employed in making a thing properly, and a good craftsman is one who has complete mastery over his tools and material, and who uses them with skill and honesty.

    N. W. Kay

  15. #30
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    James,
    We won't tell Chris to strike your comment from his book...LOL
    FWIW, when I do build my bench, you'll know that it was "homebaked" and the sauce was home made too.... I deal with alot of stainless steel for the day job & we have some 1/4" wall tubing that I can get for a VERY LOW PRICE (as in zip, zero, nadda, FREEBIE, one of the perks for working at a very small business and being related to the owner I guess) that is destined to become the base for the bench.
    Racking will be a non-issue, nor will "heft". I cut the legs and each one weighs @ 40lbs, nevermind stretchers etc. The base should push 250-300 lbs.
    How the heck did I go from had cut DT's to this in Roberts build a thread here anyway? TSA's coming after me for hijacking I think.
    Sorry Robert....

    Greg

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