The commission is to build an arbor for a wedding in one day. Yup…. one day. You have the bride’s rough sketch, and are told the arbor has to be both KD and be durable outdoors as a vine arbor, as the bride will keep it forever.
Here is traditional construction with a few shortcuts and speed techniques beginners might find useful.
No dimensions in the sketch, but I know the couple are to stand beneath it in the ceremony, which will be conducted on a concrete floor. That means a suitable stand is required. It’s drawn pretty narrow…too narrow for couple, gown and ring bearer IMO…so I allow 32”, the width of a narrow door, times two for 64” of width. The drawn posts look to be 6” and the top beams 4”, and I decide to reverse that, as the piece will have to support grapes or Clematis one day. I’m told the preacher is 6’6”, so I make the interior height a full 7’ to allow for cleaner wedding photos.
Roughcut No. 2 Western Red Cedar was selected, jointed, thickness planed, ripped and crosscut to the plan. Gangcutting was used for speed…for example, clamp them together and rip or crosscut two or even three boards at once using a deeper blade setting on table or circular saw. No margin for error kickback-wise gangcutting, so make sure your technique and machines are up to it. Sharp blades, square fences/cutoff tables, using Speed Squares to guide all Circular Saw cuts, and properly-seasoned wood are key.
How to construct it KD, durable outdoors and with enough sheer strength to support wet, heavy vines in the winter wind? Deck screws? No way…fine for horizontal decks, but in this application they will work loose with seasonal movement and wind, eventually self-destructing. How about shiplap joints and simple tusk tenons?
Being a loyal Neanderthal, I rapidly cut the shiplaps using two of my favorite old-time hand tools….the 14v mini-circular saw and a framing chisel. I cut the stretcher tenons on the band saw and fit them into mortises using cordless drill and saber saw.
Saber saws…one of the first hand power tools my boatbuilder Uncle acquired in the early 1940’s. This one is a commercial-grade Bosch he would have given his eyeteeth for. Those Bosch “Progressor” blades are the cat’s meow for carving end grain. Always sneak up to your lines, gradually hogging out waste, when cutting with this tool, and you’ll get clean, 90-degree results. Cut dead to the line with even a slightly-curved line in one pass and the blade will twist and ruin your clean cut.
For fast layout, the piece is constructed one side at a time in place after the shiplaps are cut…square being obtained using diagonals. See the tape measure monitoring the diagonal as I work? See the ice pick holding the zero end of the tape in place? Buy you a dozen ice picks on Ebay for the shop. Boatbuilders use them by the dozen to hold springy battens when lofting curves, but they literally have dozens of handy uses you won’t think about until you acquire some.
Once mortises are cut and the stretcher tenons fitted, their depth is marked and they are removed for tusk tenon construction. I don’t get fancy with angles and bevels using this soft cedar. Two Forstner Bit holes connected and squared off on the bottom by the saber saw is more than adequate. The squared bottoms of these mortises (at the top of the picture) are cut slightly deeper than the depth marks to insure they will pull up dead tight, even should this #2 cedar shrink some later in the summer. The tops of the mortises are left round, and the squared tusk wedges are cut on table and band saw to fit.
Some day in its life, somebody is gonna bang those tusks in too hard, so I anticipate that and reinforce the tenon short grain with durable luan dowels…
…. poly-glued in and cut flush. Note I trim the center stretchers a bit shorter than their upper counterparts for proportion, as they only pierce one layer as opposed to three layers of wood.
Continued…
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I like the trick with the jointer, Bob...very elegant...very quick...very clean.
