It was almost 70F today!  Spring is just around the corner.  Finally!

I took advantage of the warmth and spent an hour or so in the shop after work today.  Today saw the start of the from/rear rails.  I marked a master directly from the full-size drawing and them ganged all the rails together and marked them all to match.  At this point I had a decision to make.  Should I mark out all of joinery or tackle them one at a time?  I opted for the one at a time option this round.

I designed these tansu so that I could use one setting on the mortise gauge.  So I grabbed the gauge and marked out the tenons on the first piece.  The tenons on the rails are stacked tenons.  After sawing out the waste for the full-width portions I began marking out the square portion of the tenon.

A while back I wrote a post about using your chisels for marking distances.  The full-width portion of the matching mortise is 12mm deep.  So I used my 12mm mortise chisel to mark the distance on the tenon.  Since I want a slight clearance gap between the tenon and the bottom of the mortise, I sawed on the shoulder side of the line.  This effectively gives me about a 1.5mm gap.

I managed to complete two rails before I called it quits.  A quick dry fit to verify that things are as they should be.

Part 4 Greg Merritt Part 6