End workup part 1

After fussing around with the 6 tenons, here is the result. Shoulders are nice and tight, piece is square. Finished up a little after midnight, and didn't feel like doing the other side.
Dry fit of one side.



I don't have a Lie-Nielsen medium shoulder plane (GREAT GIFT IDEA, HINT HINT!) so this is what I came up with. I clamped the board to the bench, and gave it a couple of strokes with the block plane. I noticed that if there were really tight and started taking a lot off, that the tenon was starting to get a bevel, so I took a chisel and squared them up again. There is a mistake in this picture. Can you find it? I forgot to cut off the cheek cuts on this side. Good thing I didn't break down the saw.

Fitting the tenon.



I put the dado blade in the saw to make the cheek cuts. I did have my standard blade in the saw, but then remembered how many I had to cut, and that was going to be a lot of nibbling. This makes quick work. Also note in this picture, that the cheek cuts are a proud of the shoulder cuts. The shoulder cut should have been fit, but when I ran the cheek cuts, it was loose, so I widened them up a little. In hindsight, it should make fitting the tenons easier.

Making the shoulder cut.



Here, I'm cutting the cheeks on my shop made tenon jig. It rides on the table saw fence. It's nice and high, which keeps fingers far away from the blade. As before, i made test cuts before running the stock through.

Making the cheek cut at the tablesaw.



Saw is setup, and now it's time to run some stock. I'm going to have 1/8" shoulders on all 4 sides, so it's a matter of running the piece through, rotating it, and running it through again.

Running pieces to establish the tops of the shoulders.



After some tweeking, I got to this, which is the thickness that I want.

Test piece.



After the piece was marked for tenons, I set up a stop on the fence, and used a 1/8" drill bit to set the height of the blade. Here I'm running a test piece to check the amount of stock to remove. I'll double check this with the leg to make sure it fits.

Setup piece to determine height.



After the legs were mortised, I need to prepare stock for the rails. I skipped taking pictures, but it was just cutting down pieces on the chop saw, ripping them to width, and trimming them to final length. The result is the picture below. Next I'll lay out the tops of the tenons, and cut them on the saw.

Stock cut for the rails.



Now that the legs are to final size, I took some time and laid out where the mortises will go. On the sides, I'll have the bottom rail, a mid rail, and a top rail. It sure is nice to have a mortise machine in the shop. It makes quick work of this task. The mortise is 1/2" by a strong 1" deep. I'll have to either miter the tennon, or notch them when it comes time to cut the stretchers.

Legs with 1st set of cut mortises.