Once I had the legs, top rails and bottom rails dry fitted, I began working on the panels. There are, all told, ten panels on this piece. Six of them I bookmatched in Curly Maple. This was my first experience with bookmatching, and I'll share what I learned. First off, its a wicked good time! The process of essentially cutting a board open and discovering what the grain looks like is thrilling. I chose Curly Maple for my bookmatched panels. My panels needed to be roughly 7 in by 19 ...
As I continued to scratch my head over how to cut the cove on the top rails, I remembered reading about cutting coves on the table saw in Wood Magazine, by running material across the blade at an angle. The challenge then turned to essentially cutting a half cove. Because I wanted the base of the top rail to sit flush with the inset door fronts and the top rail to "cove outward" similarly to the profile of the leg flare, I had to come up with a way to support the base of the rail while ...
With the bottom rails shaped and surfaced, I began cutting the tenons. I'm in the process of migrating some of my operations from power tools to hand tools. At this stage, I had only a dovetail saw and a sliding miter saw. I chose to cut the bottom rail tenons to rough thickness on the miter saw and sneak up on my marking gauge lines with a rabbit block plane. MC0U8203.jpg MC0U8205.jpg The rabbit block plane is a pretty slick tool. ...
Once the legs were in good shape, I moved onto the bottom rails (or stretchers if you want to think of it as a table for now). I drew out half a pattern on a piece of mdf. The reason I used a half pattern, is so if I flipped it, I knew it my whole pattern would be symmetrical. Once I had the rails traced out, I cut them out on the bandsaw and began smoothing them just as I did with the legs. MC0U8140 (1).jpg MC0U8151.jpg MC0U8154.jpg ...
Once I had the legs roughly cut out on the bandsaw, I began the process of putting the final shape to them and smoothing the surface. MC0U8066 (1).jpg MC0U8083.jpg MC0U8105 (1).jpg After smoothing the legs with hand planes, orbital sanders and card scraper, I cut them to length. MC0U8119.jpg MC0U8111.jpg
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