Pictures of the Process, Part 1

I took a whole bunch of pictures so I'll break it up a bit.

First, we'll start at the end. I finally got the top glued up.



As you can see, I left the ends of boards 5-14 long on both ends. After I leave this overnight, I will trim this off along a line I drew with my very old, hand-made carpenter's square. (Believe me, it's straight, it's just the camera lens that makes it look all wanky)




But how did I get here? Let's take a look.

I marked out the grooves for the wagon vise chop to ride in. I then hacked them out with the massive Butcher chisel I mentioned in previous posts. Because the groove needs to be one-inch wide, I used a 1/2" chisel and made two passes down the groove.




You can see that I wasn't caring too much about the edges, but it does leave the bottom pretty smooth for such a major hack. I only need to go down the groove two times, one for each side. The chisel cuts deep enough, about 1/2" the first pass that I don't need to come back along the same route.



I got a chance to have this fun several times too many because of not following the Daily Lessons I posted earlier today. In this picture you get a glimpse of my Persuader. I weighed the mallet and the chisel after hacking around with them so much. The mallet weighs 2 lbs. 6 oz. (1100 grams), and the chisel weighs 14 oz. My hands and arms and back got quite a workout the last couple of days.

After finally getting the grooves right, I double checked my full set of lumber for the top. As you can see, they're all different lengths.



So, I cut everything that wasn't the first four boards down to around 65 inches. That gives a margin of around 2-3 inches on either side since the final length should be 60 inches. To do this, I used by great old Disston D8 and a crappy , plastic Stanley miter box.




Oh, look. After I laid out the boards and got them cut I realized I had laid-out the groove wrong, AGAIN and had to cut it AGAIN.







One of the two techniques I used was the V in the middle technique. The other was to start at one side and work my way all the way down to the other end. Neither seemed faster, but the first pass was always much slower than the second pass. And when you did the second pass, the chisel always wanted to wander off into the existing empty space to the side. This meant that I always had to trim up the side of the second pass.



Next set of images I'll show how I eventually solved the problem of the vise end block where the collar for the vise screw needed to be inset. And I'll show how I cut the groove for the deadman to slide in, how I screwed up yet AGAIN, and had to cut the groove AGAIN in the process of making a whole new front board. And then we'll see the actual glue-up process.

Yipee!

AAAndrew