Given it's going to rain all day tomorrow, I swapped my Friday and Saturday around.....so outside all day today, and drawing all day tomorrow. So, I have some progress to report. I grabbed one of the 200 x 200s off the pile, and started cleaning it up. However, after doing 2 faces I came across this:
So that got set on one side, and will be replaced. I very carefully stipulated that there was to be no sap whatsoever in any of the oak. The chap who supllied it was perfectly OK with replacing it.
So, I moved on to the next one, and it cleaned up nicely. Now, I know Rob likes a nice bit of pippy oak, so here is a shot of the show face of my central garage post:
Working on the top end first. It's not often you set out a bridle (actually it's two tenons) with a 70mm gap. That's beyond most mortise gauges:
That's where a proper rip saw really comes into its own. A hardpoint half-rip-half-cross-cut would clog up horribly in this wet wood. Four TPI eats it for breakfast. Nonetheless, I sawed 3 or 4mm inside the lines, as controllability of both a circular saw and a rip saw isn't up to the standrard required for the finished faces of joint work. Take a look at the off-cut in the next photo, on the ground below the workpiece. You can see the saw wandered miles off track on the underside, when I had assumed it was just following along the circular saw kerf:
I did the accurate stuff with a chisel. There are times when I really wish I had a long 2" chisel, or a slick:
It fits!! First time, too:
As always with joints, get the shoulders right and you are almost home. The rest is secondary. So I fetched a long tenon saw (the one with the more suitable tooth count is simply too short):
The rest is standard sawing and chiselling, and the result, after chamfering, are a pair of tenons straddling the gap for the cross piece:
They fitted first time too. A lot of that is down to having really square stock to work with:
This is the top end of the post fully assembled, but obviously without any pegs:
So, to the other end. Now you can imagine how many times I measured before cutting the post to length.
(edit.....I should have said that I have cut the posts such that the top of the beam will be about 20mm too high, because I reckon there will be about 20 to 30mm of shrinkage in this build up over the next couple of years). The final operation for the day was to let the steel shoe into the foot of the post (how often does a shoe go into a foot!!
):
The main mortise was done with a drill and chisels. It really isn't easy housing out end grain. It's easy parting the fibres, but a nightmare trying to chop them off at the right depth. I had to get the screaming monster out for the shallow part. That's the bearing surface, and its depth is critical......and trying to get a flat bottom on it with hand tools wasn't worth the struggle:
Tidied everything away ready for a resumption on Sunday, and swept up as much of the oak sawdust and shavings as possible, because there is no better way of permanently staining concrete than leaving wet oak shavings on it.