Tréteau XXIV

A bit of a break in the action - this is my first post in three days. I was working on a revision of my Japanese carpentry drawing essay, which I finally was able to send it off to those that have purchased it so far. Many thanks to Will B. and 'Heffesan' for bringing various points to my attention over the past couple of weeks.

I thought I'd start off today's post with a few photos that I had no room for in the previous post...


Here's that skinny barbe against leg DP:


The upper end of the same brace, against leg CM:


Another issue that has slowed me down a pace has been the discovery a couple of days back that my long side braces were NFG. The problem lay in the already-cut mortises for the interior x-brace sets. Upon a double-check after noticing the discrepancy (and fortunately before I had started cutting out the tenons), I discovered something was awry in the slope angles for the mortise side walls. Eventually I figured out the source of the problem: I had taken the pertinent measurements for the mortise layout off of an old drawing in which I had laid the interior x-braces out incorrectly, resulting in them being parallelogram-shaped. I had moved on to another drawing, back to square 1 as it were, however I had omitted to delete the drawing which had the mistake from my set of files. Well, that'll teach me! I've drawn this sawhorse so many times now that I had literally half a dozen complete or near-complete drawings all of which look very similar, and I simply referred to the wrong one when I was laying out. That cost me 4' of 8/4 Canarywood and an entire day of work, not to mention a few choice epithets directed at, uh, no one in particular. I could have patched the mortises and re-cut them, but I decided to simply make them again.

Today I managed to get all the tenons on the long side braces cut out. The long side braces are these gippers:


Here's one of the tenons after cut-out - the simplest one was first, this fits to leg DP:


Here's another - in this case, two of the long side braces are in fact identical in cut out, as they both fit against faces aplomb legs:


Like the other tenons, these are tapered:


This is the rough-cut out, where I leave the line prior to fitting:


At the upper end, all the long braces terminate in this fashion:


Here are all the upper tenons now cut out on all four of the long side braces:


And all the lower tenons are also cut out, again, two are the same, and two are unique:


Another view:


Tomorrow I will complete the half-laps and fit the braces to the legs and the top beam, and hopefully have time to re-do the mortises for the interior x-braces, now correctly laid out. I'm starting to approach the end of this build and greatly looking forward to seeing how it all comes out.

Thanks for dropping by today. --> Go to post XXV