A Square Deal (14)

A brief update, nothing too major. Nothing to see here folks, move along, move along....

I've got the breadboard ends fitted onto the side table slab, and after trimming the 'horns' off the breadboard ends, cleaned the end surface up with a handplane:

With grain going in every which direction, it is helpful to be able to plane both directions without tearout, and a 60˚ plane makes that more readily possible:

The joint for these breadboard ends is similar to the ones on the coffee table in that there are twin tongue and grooves incorporated:

The main difference is that this side table top has single central tenons instead of the triple tenons as seen on the coffee table. The central dado and tongue portions are held back about 0.01" so as to ensure that the visble abutments on the table surface come together tightly.

Here's the side table top through this stage:

A did some cross-cutting of various parts to get them to length, nothing worth taking pictures of.

I then decided to do a rip cut on a $400 (gulp!) stick of Gabon ebony, which will be used as stock for the double hammerhead locking keys at the table corners on both pieces.

On stuff like this, such an expensive and hard-to-replace bit of wood, cutting needs to be thought about carefully. Certainly not a blasé cut, joint and plane session. If the wood moved too much, or the cut line followed the grain in an unfortunate manner, I would be looking at going shopping for another piece of material.

I needed to rip the stick in half, and judged it would just yield a couple of 7/8" (0.875") sticks if split right down the middle. I would need all that to allow for any movement, hoping to clean up so as to leave stock a hair over 3/4". I marked the cut lines, adjusted the fence on the smaller bandsaw, and started the cut. I saw I was a hair off my line, so I tweaked the fence and, somewhat holding my breath, ripped down the length:

Ebony dust is funny - it doesn't hang in the air but drops straight to the ground and cannot be easily brushed off your skin but you actually need to wash off to get clean.

After the rip, the sticks had bowed slightly, but definitely within reasonable expectation:

The cut quality, with just the regular 10mm Hitachi general purpose blade, was very good I thought:

I like that bandsaw!

Out of curiosity, I checked to see how closely I had managed to split that line. First one board:

And then the other:

Gee, I guess even a broken clock can be right twice a day. Lucky! I'll take it when I can get it.

I'll cross cut each of those sticks before jointing flat and dimensioning. It looks like I'll get enough out of that stick to do all the keys and probably any other mechanical fastening parts, pegs, wedges, etc.

A slight change has been made to the side table design. I realized that with a drawer and dust panel fitted, the space under the table top would catch dust and be tough to clean so I thought it wise to add some blocking strips in the spaces between the pillow blocks, what the Japanese would call mendo-ita. In the initial sketch I made these blocking pieces a contrasting color, though this is by no means decided yet:

In the above photo the legs are shorter than they will be in the actual piece. Besides the contrasting approach, I could use more VG bubinga, or some other wood perhaps(?). The drawer will have a handle fitted, and this is likely to be blackened iron or something like that, and the keys are already black, so.... I'll figure it out.

All for now, thanks for your visit! On to post 15.