Bottom shelf work

Well, after cutting the shoulders, I got to thinking, how do i go about cutting the notch in the shelf to make the two tenons? My solution was to not worry about it, and I took the rails back to the mortise machine and made one continuous mortise. I made the tenon oversize, and now is the time to trim to fit. It's really slow going, given my compliment of tools, but after a couple of hours, I had them fitting pretty darn good.

OOPS!

Can you see my mistake? Check the top spindle mortise. It's larger than the others. I think it was a result of not being tight up to the fence when I cut it. Thankfully, it was still small enough that the spindle covered it, but I did have to glue some material to the tenon, and then trim it back to fit. After assembly, you'll never be able to identify it.
Dry fit.



To transfer to the other rail, it's just a simple matter of extending lines, and ticking them over to the other piece. I only need to worry about the ends, because the depth will be set by the mortise machine fence.

Transferring to other rail.

Layout for the mortise is like before. I put some X's in this one because I am planning on doing two mortises, and I don't want to chop farther than I need to.

Layout for mortise.



With just what you see below, I clamped up the table so I could get a measurement for the lower shelf. I have already glued that together using the same techniques that I used for the table top. I was really scratching my head on how to attach this, and my "Mission furniture, and how to make it" book in the end gave me my answer. My concerns were racking forces, and if a mortise and tenon was going to be strong enough. I thought about using cleats to help, but I couldn't find examples of that in the book, so I decided to keep it traditional.

Clamp-up for measurements.



With the spindles done, I thought it would be a good time to cut the arches in the bottom rails. I laid it out using a flexible ruler, cut it at the bandsaw, and smoothed it with a drum sander mounted in the drill press. Here is the result.

Arch cut into the rail.