Ben Arnott

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.

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The rabbit block plane is a pretty slick tool. The plane iron extends to the very edge of the sole, which allows you to get in tight on the shoulder of a tenon. There are little "nickers" which are basically just knives that cut the fibers of the wood ahead of the iron. This ensures you don't tear out the end of the shoulder with the iron.

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Once the tenons were cut on the bottom rails, I moved on to work on the top rails.

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The top rails in my design were to have a gentle cove to match the flare of the top of the legs. It was easy to draw on paper, but I couldn't figure out how I was going to actually do it. I hit a wall...