I have managed a few hours here and there, and have made some decent progress.
Remember the central post which had some de-barked wane? Well, I sorted it out:
Note the screws acting as (temporary) clamps. And note my cordless Stanley screwdriver, as my battery powered one was elsewhere.
A day or two later, after ripping off the excess on the bandsaw, I planed it up:
You might glimpse later that when it was cut to length, and then had the shoulders and cheeks removed for the big tenon, there was no remnant of the chamfer. I didn't get a specific photo, unfortunately.
Meanwhile, there are some very long shoulders to cut in the brackets for a tenon on each end. They were all done by knife first, then removing a sliver to leave a little trench to guide the tenon saw (a Sandvik, which is my longest tenon saw), then hogging off the waste with a 1-1/2" chisel, then paring, and finally planing with a no.10 Coachmaker's Rebate Plane (lots of checking with straight-edges and calipers). A router plane didn't work as of course these pieces hadn't been thicknessed, or in any way regularised......they'd just had each face roughly flattened by hand.....which meant that there wasn't a reference face to work from with a router plane:
Now, going back to the conversation about over-dried wood, here is a real-life consequence:
My second line of chiseling (before I'd got used to the behaviour of the wood) led to a chunk breaking off prematurely, and me following through with the chisel and taking a lump out of the shoulder. I set the piece carefully on one side, finished the joint, and then before closing up for the evening I glued it back in place. There's a photo in the next post.
Here's the router NOT working. Well, you know, it worked perfectly well, but it took me a second or three to realise that it wasn't going to be of much help as it simply off-set from a not-necessarily-parallel face:
The tenons complete:
Here is the bracket being offered into place for the marking of the mortice, held against a reference straight edge:
As a result of years of experience with green oak framing, I routinely drill peg holes before chopping out the associated mortice. This means that the hole will definitely line up (which isn't guaranteed when drilling in from each side into a void in the middle), and it means there is no break-out inside the mortice. Drilling these holes wasn't easy, because the only drill I had of the diameter I wanted had a lead screw, which grabbed the work-piece up from the pillar drill table, meaning I had to clamp down for each of 56 holes........tedious, to say the least. To guide the lead screw into the right place, I tapped the wood lightly with a very small punch first:
With small mortices, I just chop them out with a chisel. With big ones like these, I drilled out the bulk first with a Forstner bit, which has the great virtue of leaving a level "floor" to the mortice, and of course speeds up the process enormously:
Then it's just a question of chiseling, paring, checking for square, and offering-up-and-adjusting:
I tidied all the shoulders up as a job lot, a little later in the process.
Here's the allowance I have made for expansion of the bracket (and we'll come back to this later):
That's 9 or 10mm, which is unnecessarily too much, and I reduced slightly with the others.
Having done one, it was just rinse and repeat for the other side:
Back in a sec........
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