I’ve been making good progress so far. I have the frame platforms and the sides done, but now I need to actually get these pieces joined together. The platform dados I made before are part of that, but the essential joints for this are the mortises in the rear and the dovetails up front. I’ll save the dovetails for another post, for now I’ll show the mortise and tenons.
The first step is to use the dado channels as marking guides. I use my marking knife to carry the mark all the way around the side piece and mark out the mortise from the outside. The best way I found to cut this mortise was to use my brace to drill out the majority of the waste. From there, I would use my chisels to cleanly cut away the remaining waste. The trick here is to make sure the mortise is cut straight. If you cut at an angle, the mortise will either be too big or too small. In my case, I cut poorly on one of them and it created a gap around the tenon when fitted. I will show how to fix this another time, but for now this should suffice. I do this for all 6 mortises.
The next thing to do is cut out the tenon on the rear piece of the platform frame. The front side of this piece is where the tenon will sit so I need to cut the waste from the back side. First, I need to measure and mark directly from the mortise. I fit the frame piece into the corresponding dado and line it up with the mortise. From the opposite side I use a knife or pencil to mark the frame piece from within the mortise hole. I mark out the correct depth and saw the small piece away. I then use chisels to cleanly pair away what was left from the saw and test fit. I do that repeatedly until it fits snug.
One lesson I learned from this was that I needed to keep the frame pieces a bit longer than my plans called for. I tried getting this fit perfect so I had cut these pieces to final size prior to doing this joinery. The end result was that I had a couple tenons end up a little too short and as I mentioned before one had gaps in it. This isn’t a huge deal and I’m sure most people won’t even notice it, but I try to achieve accuracy at all times so this was a tough lesson. Regardless, I plan to show how to address these issues because remaking those pieces isn’t practical.
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