Maybe I haven’t said, but I’m building a table for the kitchen in Casco. It’s going to be a trestle table, I mean, rather than four legs, one in each corner, it’s going to have two things sort of like letter H on its side for legs, held together by a big board going through a slot in each one with wedges holding that board to the leg things. The vertical parts of the legs will be 5/4 pine, as will the top, and the parts on the floor and under the table top (what were the vertical parts of the H before it got turned on its side) are 2 x 4 inch pine (or, 1 1/2 x 3 1/2 by the time it’s done). I have yet to buy the wood for the top, because I know I have plenty to do with the legs first, and you don’t have to worry about dye lots with wood. The vertical parts of the legs are skinny trapezoids.
This was the first time I’ve made a diagonal cut with the taper cut gizmo on the ten-inch table saw, and it was not without some trepidation. The taper cut gizmo is two U-shaped aluminum extrusions that pivot together at one end and have a couple of wing nuts holding a slotted sheet metal arc that lets you set the angle between the two. One extrusion rides against the rip fence of the saw and the other has a little protrusion at the end to push the workpiece along. There’s a nice big handle on the part that goes along the fence. The trouble is, you have to hold the workpiece against the whole thing. You just have to remember that you’re not going to push farther than you can reach and you’re not going to reach across the saw blade. The saw cut through 5/4 pine as though it wasn’t there. I’m not sure how it would like cutting maple, but this project is working fine.
The legs are going to be three pieces of wood each, one big rectangle and two little right trapezoids, one on each side. Here they are cut, with the last cut edge of a trapezoid just having been planed.
Um, it would be more picturesque with the plane standing on its base, so you could see it, I guess. Not gonna do it. Dulls the plane iron. Nobody who knows what they’re doing will rest a plane on its base.
Next step was to rout the ends of the rectangles down to 3/4 inch thick. When the trapezoids go on, the ends of the rectangles will be tenons that fit into yet-to-be-cut mortises in the horizontal bars. Here’s the state as of the end of Sunday:
Something’s fishy on the left-hand end of the legs. The cuts don’t go all the way to the end of the board. That’s my mistake. When I figured the length of the legs, I thought 28″ high table top and cut the legs allowing for 1 1/4 inch tenons at each end and a little to spare, so I cut them to 28 inches long. I forgot to subtract the thickness of the table top. So I have most of an inch to cut off one end of each piece. Darn. I wasted four inches of board. Granted, that’s a scrap board, but even a scrap board is more likely to be useful if it’s four inches longer.
The next steps (not counting trimming the ends of the boards — that’s a routine step) involve a tool I got at Home Depot in Windham (because Lowe’s didn’t have any in stock when we were there getting the washer and dryer), a biscut joiner. I did my homework with internet reviews and settled on the DeWalt 682.
Biscuit joiners are by no means new, but they weren’t around when I was watching my dad do woodworking. I first saw them on a TV show, something like Yankee Workshop, probably over ten years ago. The idea is that a circular blade cuts a groove, a segment of a circle, out of the edge of two pieces of wood that you want to join. You glue a biscuit of wood, a precision-made chip shaped like a flat football, in the matching grooves.The biscuit makes a joint a little like a mortise and tenon to align the pieces of wood and provide more gluing surface than just the matching edges of the wood. It’s supposed to be a quick, strong, precise way to make wood joints. I’ll see how it works out in a week or two, whenever I can get back to the project.