Tréteau III

Some progress realized today, both in the real and virtual worlds. I took the material down to the street and worked with a guy to joint and plane all the material, managing to get all the pieces to about 0.015" oversize:


I'll be working on putting the lines into place next, aiming to lay out all the sticks before proceeding to cut out.

So I returned to the drawing to work on getting all the tenons sorted out, which helped me learn a few more things about how the drawing method works, and I also discovered a goof up on my part with the interior x-braces which connect the long side braces together - I had them fitting fine but of a smaller size than they should have been. It had been a case of connecting to the wrong line in the first place and then managing to put all my marks on the wrong line. I've sorted out now, and that has made the x-brace section a fair bit taller, by 0.25" or so.

I thought I post up a few pictures of the varied tenon arrangements on this piece. It's possible to squeeze every last little bit of space out of a given tenon junction - note how the protruding tenon on this leg slips in under the short-side x-brace barbe:


The tenons themselves diminish in an unusual manner, by simply tapering:


The arrangment is different in every case - here's the opposite leg to the one above:


And an interior view with the leg out of the way:


The short side x-braces will have tenons as well - I haven't gotten to that part yet. They will penetrate about halfway into the leg at each end, not run through. The x-braces that run between the long side braces will however through tenon and will also taper.

The tapering is presumably to make it possible to assemble, given the way that tapered post structures have to go together incrementally, a little bit here, a little bit there.

At the top of the sawhorse, the legs tenons are all quite varied too - here's one end:


On the opposite end of the beam you can see where the two legs slightly interfere with one another:


I'll be trimming the corner off the left hand leg.

The mortising will not be so easy in some spots, that's for certain. The right hand side leg in the picture above will be the easiest case, since that leg is rotated to the short axis and thus the mortise will be square (on horizontal alignment). It's opposite number requires a parallelogram-shaped mortise, and the other two have 5-sided profiles.

I've got another few hours of drawing ahead of me yet before I can start on the layout on the material.

All for today. Thanks for dropping by. Go to part IV