Thread: Kuffy's Hall Table. WIP

Kuffy, that 'housed' sliding dovetail joint is interesting. It must've been fun to set up your gear to cut that accurately?!

Cheers,

It was pretty easy to cut the dovetail. First I cut the housing joint about 1.5mm deep using my panelsaw with a 4.2mm wide flat top rip blade. I can't use dado stacks on my saw. Then I used an improvised crosscut sled on my router table and just pushed the rails over the dovetail bit. Setup time for both operations would have been about 3minutes I guess and cutting the damn housings takes an eternity using only a 4.2mm wide cutter. Eternity being about 20secs

The dovetails didn't fit together straight off the tools. I could have got them to fit but I needed the thickness of the vertical uprights to be fatter than the width of the housing so that when I had assembled the breadboard end drawer divider things, I could shave them down some to get flush seams and then....hopefully the verticals fit nicely in the housings and from there I can refine the dovetail width to fit in the dovetail socket. It was as hard to do in real life as it is to try and explain that...just assume it was a pain in the butt

Early finish Friday at work today so I got home at about 1pm. Spent the arvo tapering the legs and then smoothing the tapered sawn face with a hand plane. The Redgum legs put up a little bit of a fight against a plane blade but nothing extraordinarily difficult to overcome. Not a huge amount of tear out, but there was areas that had the white mark of death because (I think) the plane blade is slightly stretching the fibers before slicing through them and making it turn white, just like when you stretch blutack. Although I see many finished examples of hand crafted work exhibiting these white marks, I chose to fix up most of the white marks with a card scraper because it is easy work. Then I realised that I had to chop a mortise into the tapered faces. If I had of stopped for a second, I could have picked up my trusty trim router and hogged out the mortise lickity split before tapering the legs, but instead I chopped them out using Jap HSS bevel edge chisels after I had tapered them. Didn't take long. The Redgum is not a worthy opponent against a super duper sharp chisel powered by my now heavily beaten and bruised smasher.

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I am hoping I can get the frame assembled this weekend, but I still need to do a bunch of work to the dust panels which will sit above the drawers and prevent the sight line into the drawer via the gap between frame and floating top. We'll see, it is highly dependant on how many lunches I take over the next two days

So for starters this weekend I cut the tenons on the stretcher rails between front and rear legs and fit them to the hand cut mortise in the legs. The tenons fit snug as a bug in a rug, so much so that I almost knocked myself out when pulling the rail back out of the mortise.
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Then I machined some Tassie Oak into 28x20 to use it as the drawer runners/kickers. I decided to go crazy on the joinery so there is a mortise and tenon between runner/kicker and rails along with a tongue and groove in the runner/kicker and drawer guide. At least this way the joinery locates the runner/kicker for me when I am rushing around like a headless chook during glue up which I am really beginning to dread. It's gonna be a nightmare!
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Then I machined the two 7mm thick dust panels (back left on my workbench below) and ran a groove in the rails and kickers to accept the panel. Since I was filming a workshop tour video this arvo, I decided to shamelessly promote my upcoming hall table build video by displaying the parts neatly on the bench. All of the joinery is done for the lower frame. I only need to cut in a few butterflys/dutchmans into the top to stabilise some checking. The checks won't move, but the dutchmans look cool and are a piece of cake to install and will suit the live edge slab look of the piece. And then I need to machine and cut the dovetailed drawers, but this won't be done until after I have assembled the frame 15° out of square and plumb

Below is the image of the frame components and top awaiting final planing, scraping and sanding.
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Not a bad way to spend an hour after work today smooth planing the frame components. I picked up the nearest junker Stanley #4, gave the blade a quick lick across the stones and started to smooth the tassie oak components. This was easy, sooooo easy. Mostly because the tassie oak is void of feature and reversing grain. And the best part is a lot of the tassie oak I used has a fair amount of sloping grain which always makes the planing easy. And then I started to smooth out the faces of the redgum legs with my now less than super duper sharp blade. You can certainly hear the difference between slicing and tearing. I got it done, but there is a fair amount of micro tearout which you can see in the photo showing up as white highlights. I'll fix that up tomorrow with a card scraper if I can be bothered.
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Not a very eventful weekend. Didn't even turn on one machine all weekend. First I fixed up some of the minor tearout that I was getting on the redgum legs with a card scraper. They are finish ready now, though I will go over them with a bit of hand sanding with #320/400 before applying any finish to show up any dings/dents/scratches and glue marks which arrive between now and then. Yesterday afternoon, I decided to reduce the workload for the main glue up by assembling the drawer guides, runners and kicker together to make three components into one. The runners/kickers attach to the guides via a groove in the guide and a tongue in the runner/kicker. ezymode location ftw!
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Then today I spent the best part of about 3 hours applying blue tape to any area which may get glue squeezeout. It is a tedious job but I knew I wouldn't have great access to the joints once all of the clamps had been installed and cleaning up lots of dried glue squeeze out the day after just simply sucks!
Below you can see
4 @ bessey 1500mm parallel clamps
2 @ bessey 600mm parallel clamps
6 @ bessey 300mm parallel clamps
8 @ Irwin quick grip 6" clamps
2 @ Bessey band clamps.

All clamped up, according to my video camera in 20minutes flat. 10minutes to get the drawer guides and rails glued, squared and clamped. 10 minutes again to get the stretcher attached to the leg mortises and then the leg assemblys to the upper frame. So using Titebond III I reckon I am well within recommended setup times. Though I wouldn't have care if I was still fudging the joints 30mins after initial glue application. Been there, done that and still got paid for job well done
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My movie finished, and I already forgot what I was watching but it was entertaining...I think? So I went outside to remove the clamps and tape because I don't want the clamps weighting down the rails overnight, and I certainly don't want sticky leftovers from the tape if I leave it there all night and tomorrow until I get home from work.

A couple of pics to make the above pic with all the clamps a little more clearer as to what is under the clamps.
With tape
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Without tape
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A couple joinery shots before I clean them up. The sliding dovetails will require a bit of meat to be remove from the rail and vertical to get below the chipout. Thats what I get for docking things to length using a blunt ripping blade And the other shot is of the stretcher rail fitting into the taper of the leg, not bad if I do say so myself.
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Liking where this is going mate, looking good!

I had a change of heart on my design. I mocked it up with the top boards sitting on it and as I was staring at the piece, I felt the front is very flat. There is no depth to the front at all. It is unnatural.
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The legs go straight up. the rails connect flush to the front of the legs without a reveal. the inset drawers will be flush with the rails, and then the top panels which are slightly skinnier than the frame width sits behind everything else. So at best the side profile looks like a house which stands straight up from the ground and then there is a pitched roof without any eaves or anything to give it depth. BORING!

So I have come up with a solution which is a piece of cake to achieve though it means using a thicker and therefore more expensive piece of timber for the drawer fronts. Instead of having the inset drawer fronts sit flush with the rails. I will curve the front of the drawer so that the crest of the curve sits 15mm in front of the rails, and therefore creating the depth to the front.
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That is the plan at the moment, but I may end up pillowing the drawer fronts if I don't like the simple curve on the one axis.

First time comment.
But been watching progress.
It's looking great and I think your on the money with regard the drawer.
Top stuff

Cheers Matt

'Mostly' hand cut dovetailed drawer day. First up I did a bit of chisel work on the hall table frame to remove any glue in the corners and random gluey fingerprints which seem to happen when I glue something up.

Then I machined the drawer part components. Figured River Redgum drawer fronts, and plain jane Tassie Oak drawer sides and backs. I will half blind dovetail the drawer front to sides tomorrow arvo, but today I managed to finish the through dovetails for the drawer back -> side connection. The drawer cavity isn't 100% perfectly square, as if I care. The figure in the redgum drawer fronts will get me forgiven for being a total hack.
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I made sure all of my dovetail 'tails' were centered and symmetrical on the drawer sides so I could easily use the bandsaw to cut them out without having to become braindead marking each tail out by hand and then cutting it by hand. Just a simple wedge shape jig with a hook on the end to locate the drawer side and then push it into the blade until I am pretty damn close to the baseline that I did bother to mark out. I need to mark approximately half of the markings on the first board. Then I make the first cut, flip it side to side and make the next cut. Pick up a new workpiece and rinse n repeat. One drawer, or 1000 drawers, too easy.
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After I had made the angled cut, I removed the fence and wedge jig and hogged away the waste in the pin socket using the bandsaw. Below is how the drawer sides are presented to the muppet working on the workbench. All he needs to do is clean up the pin socket all the way to the baseline and they are good to go.
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And all cleaned up. You can see I have cut a shallow rebate on the inside face of the drawer side using the panel saw. I like doing this because it gives me a nice clean crisp connection on the inside corner joint and also gives me a hard edge to put my chisel up against. It hides a multitude of sins. Also I can now smooth plane the inside of the drawer side without it effecting the joinery fit. I will give the inside top edge of the drawer a slight chamfer which will completely disguise the rebate until you pull the entire drawer out and only then can you see what I did.
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Then I cut the pins all by hand. Mark them out with a knife, cut them with my Jap saw and clean up with the chisel. I know that I'm pretty average with a hand saw but fairly decent with a chisel. So when I cut them with a Jap saw, I cut away from the line by about 1mm. Then I can clean it up with a chisel. It takes more time doing it this way, but it takes waaaaaaay longer to start again because I did something like undercutting the line with the hand saw.....
I reckon the fit is pretty good. Not perfect, but by the time a bit of glue goes in there it should end up being a pretty neat and tidy joint.
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And here is a pic displaying my original intention of having the drawer fronts flush with the frame. Looks flat to me, and so it is 100% confirmed that I will step the fronts out of the frame by ~15mm and curve the front of the drawer front.
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I only got one of the half blind dovetails chopped into the redgum drawer front this arvo after work. The bloody timber is fighting me all the way making a mouse out of me. But tomorrow I have cunning plan to use my trim router to hog away the waste, and possibly some of the material which isn't actually waste. But today's efforts were pretty successful. It's a neat fitting joint, snug as a bug in a rug. Ignore the patches on the ends which appear to be super glue holding together cracked half pins. It's not super glue, and they aren't cracked half pins. Don't question it, just trust me because I cannot tell a lie.

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Nice super glue.
Sorry meant dovetail you know me can't spell to save myself.


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Fair enough Matt. I often misspell "dovetail" as "super glue". It's a common mistake I am sure