Well, I seem to be going at laser speed without needing to buy one!
Some more free time today meant a chance to make some more progress. It's much the same as you saw before...
Having cut all the easy square mortises in the head end lower rail, it was an easy job to cut all the matching tenons. This lot took just a leisurely-paced morning. I cut them in five batches of three, marking, sawing, paring, fitting.
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There's more to do to all of them - all the arrises need to be chamfered and there are pencil marks to be planed/scraped/sanded away - but buoyed up by progress I decided to have a quick dry run to see if these could all be fitted together.
It soon became clear that wrestling the curved rail onto the tops of what you see in this picture was not going to be possible at all - it was all just too uncontrolled. I dismantled the bottom rail, had a bit of a tidy up, and tried a different tack.
I thought that if I laid it flat on the bench, with some thin bits to lift the slats into position, and assembled the top first, I'd have a better chance.
This shows an early stage. I'd pushed in the first two tenons at the right hand end and put a clamp over, just to stop them opening up again.
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I could then work my way along, towards the camera, easing each tenon into place. (It helped that I had chamfered all the ends with a chisel before starting.) There were blocks clamped to the bench, so I could give the bottom rail a thump to encourage it into position.
To get everything to tighten up needed a couple of proper sash cramps, as seen here.
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This was all rather encouraging. I had a strong, stable structure with tidy enough joints.
I decided to check if the legs would still fit. They did!
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I've decided not to taper the legs, but they do still need trimming to length. However, it's handy to have the extra ends to mallet against when messing about like this, which is why they are still oversize.
Getting the bits apart again was much harder than putting them together. I don't have any cramps that are designed to work as spreaders, not on this scale. However, I found that the bigger heads on my other, heavier cramps (Record 136, with the T-shaped beams) have just enough spare metal to allow them to push as a spreader. Phew!
When it comes to the real glue-up, I am thinking that there's no point in messing about trying to glue all the slats, unless anyone can think of a good reason that has passed me by.
With that excitement over, there was still time to saw and plane the fancy curve on the top rail for the foot end. I sawed it with a simple turning saw, same as before, but a bit closer to the line. And then I planed it with the compass plane. Plenty of checking, turning around, feeling for bumps etc. All done with fine shavings so as to be ready to stop when I get to the line without any tear out.
That'll do for now.
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