Are you having a fit?

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Chris Hall
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Are you having a fit?

Tue Mar 20, 2012 6:18 pm

Time comes when the carcase boards and interior partitions can be assembled together. The approach I suggest is to pre-fit each piece, one at a time.

I started by fitting the end boards to the long side boards:
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Once the ends board is fitted, I set about fitting the handle to the end board. On my pieces, that meant trimming a little material off of the tongue on the handle:
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Then the handle and end board are checked for fit, and the handle tenons are individually fitted to their mortises:
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Here's a view of the assembled end board and handle:
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with the two pieces together it should be readily apparent how the top edges together unite to form a large tongue:
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That tongue will be fitted into a groove on the cap board soon enough.

A front view of the assembly:
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With all the multiple mortise and tenoned corners fitted, along with the handles, i moved on to fitting the floor panel to each carcase board:
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The floor panel had been left 0.01" fat after the last round of planing, so I took a further 0.05~0.07" off. That makes for a slight intereference fit between the floor panel and the carcase board dadoes.

The debris pile afterwards- love color of the Pau Amerello shavings!:
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Next the partitions were fitted:
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Time to give the inside of the long side carcase boards a planing to remove pencil marks and camellia oil residue:
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That completes the fitting of the individual parts. Tomorrow I'll assemble the tool box carcase, floor, and partitions.
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Chris Hall
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Re: Are you having a fit?

Wed Mar 21, 2012 7:01 pm

Today was assembly day. In some countries, a national holiday, but not in the US where people really don't tend to take much time off from work.

First partitions and floor panel sub-assembly is put together, and then the carcase end boards are placed in position:
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Then one long side board can go on:
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Then the whole shebang is flipped upside down in preparation of attaching the other long side board:
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Another view:
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A view of the underside of the box, after the other side board is started:
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The tenons gradually make their way out, emerging into kindness as one of my friends would put it:
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They are a little shy at first, but then once they get going, there's no stopping them:
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Take care as the tenons come through that no pieces of the mortise wall get pushed out - if you see this happening anywhere, tap the board back off and ease the mortise or tenon a bit and try again. You've got to be patient and observant of a lot of spots all at the same time.

Then, time to make some wedges. I grabbed a couple of pieces of Jatoba. I will be slicing into the end grain faces with the table saw:
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First cut:
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The piece of wood is flipped around 180˚ and another cut is made:
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Then a cut to define the first piece of wedge stock:
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Then the table saw fence is moved to the other side of the blade and a couple more cuts made to define two rows of wedge stock:
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Another round or two of the same process and the result is this:
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Then my camera ran out of battery juice so more pictures to follow tomorrow. I actually got the box apart again after it was all together as I decided to modify the handles a little. I'll take that up in another thread.
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Chris Hall
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Re: Are you having a fit?

Fri Mar 23, 2012 5:56 pm

Took a fully charged camera to the shop today. The wedged joinery from last time already complete, all I can show are some pictures of the assembled box:
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And a look at the underside:
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A close up of the Jatoba floating tenon, wedged with Jatoba:
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Shouldn't have used the flash on that one- I'll redo the photography and edit this post later.

One more:
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On to other matters then...
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Dan McC
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Re: Are you having a fit?

Sun Apr 29, 2012 1:44 am

Chris,

I am moving along slowly here, but still moving along. I have the end and side board joinery complete and am starting on the handles. A little oops happened on the bottom piece, so I will be resawing and regluing . . .

One thing I have been puzzling over is that the tenons on the end boards are cut at 0.375" and are later wedged so that they wind up being 0.5" wide on the outside of the box where they are visible, while the tenons on the handles are left at 0.375" wide. Why did you not choose to make the tenons on the handles 0.5" wide as well so they would match the width of the final wedged width of the end board tenons?

Dan
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Chris Hall
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Re: Are you having a fit?

Sun Apr 29, 2012 8:32 am

One thing I have been puzzling over is that the tenons on the end boards are cut at 0.375" and are later wedged so that they wind up being 0.5" wide on the outside of the box where they are visible, while the tenons on the handles are left at 0.375" wide. Why did you not choose to make the tenons on the handles 0.5" wide as well so they would match the width of the final wedged width of the end board tenons?
Well, good question. There were various reasons things ended up that way.

-the carcase tenons were wedged so as to be 0.5" wide because most of them are 0.5" tall as well and I tend to think the look is a bit cleaner when the tenons are square after they are wedged. If I made the tenons only 0.375" tall and they got wedged to be 0.5" on the face, that would have looked a bit better yet, but then the tenons are getting a bit thin for strength.

-the carcase tenons were shouldered on each flank so as to reduce the chance for a fitting/cutting out glitch at the joint, the shoulders tending to hide imperfections in that regard. I could only shoulder them about 1/16" each side due to the thinness of the carcase boards.

-the handles are that much closer to the end of the long side boards so it would have been risky to wedge them. So, I chose to leave them the size they were, however one could probably make them 0.5" wide without issue. I don't think the width difference between the handle through tenon and the other through tenons looks discordant at all, especially given the fairly discrete wedges. Others my disagree with that assessment however.

Let me add as well that if you have any fear about the wedges splitting the ends of the long side boards when they are driven in - which is a definite possibility in certain woods and with an excess of force from wedging - the thing to do would be to leave the side boards long by another inch or two at each end and after all the wedging is complete, then trim the side boards down in length. That extra material prevents blow-out in most cases and I regret at this point not showing the construction in that manner as it would have been a bit better practice, especially given that folks here are using a wide variety of woods for their projects, some of which may be more prone to shearing.
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Dan McC
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Re: Are you having a fit?

Wed Jun 13, 2012 2:50 pm

I finally managed to get the dadoes and mortices done in the bottom and sides.

Then the partitions done and fitted. On the third set. And even on those a bit of "invisible repair" diving catch was needed. First picture shows the original partitions which I made the tenons too small and had to start over. I did not use a fox wedged tenon for the bottom of the partitions, I just used a regular tenon.

Image

And here is a test fit of the whole thing with the final partitions in.

Image

Next will be some router work on the bottom and the handles, some notches in the partitions for the trays, and then after that it is some shellac for the inside, then hopefully assembly and finally the lid.
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Chris Hall
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Re: Are you having a fit?

Wed Jun 13, 2012 6:29 pm

Very nice work!!
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Dan McC
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Re: Are you having a fit?

Thu Jun 14, 2012 12:54 am

Thanks Chris. I have been happy with recent progress. And then this bad thing happened at the end of the day.

Image

I was routing the end-jogs on a router table with a fence, just taking light passes and leaving a small stub at the end to prevent blowout, then backing the fence up after each pass until I got deep enough (not pattern guided). Well the router grabbed one of the side boards and took a chunk out of it close to the corner. The picture is directly off the router. Subsequently I took the board and trimmed the little stub off. The missing chunk is about 1/4" deep.

I thought about several options.

First I figured I'd just make the round over at the corner a bit bigger. Unfortunately the missing chunk is big enough and far enough from the corner that this won't work.

Then I thought I'd make the jog a bit bigger. It's about 1/4" now, if I make it 1/2" that will cover my sin.

Then I thought I could to a multi step jog in, go for 1/4" most of the way, then down to 1/2 near the end.

Then I realized if I trimmed a bit of the bottom of the box, then made the bottom corner roundovers a bit larger, I could get away with less than a 1/2" jog in. How much? - TBD.

Finally I considered a patch. I have plenty of extra material, I could do a patch which follows the darker grain line. Basically replace the entire "foot"

Of course I could redo the entire piece. But naturally I would like to avoid that.

Anyways, the piece of wood, the router, and the router operator are all wearing their dunce caps to bed tonight. I am hoping that when I wake up in the morning I will have been struck by inspiration. Right now I favour the patch idea.

Dan
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Chris Hall
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Re: Are you having a fit?

Thu Jun 14, 2012 1:57 am

well, hmm, I would say that making the jog much deeper puts your relish into a rather thin band and you would have to be very careful when wedging the tenons not to split it out. I would suggest doing the assembly first, wedging the joint up carefully, then afterward tackling the repair by trimming an angled slice off the foot and gluing a new piece in and trimming it to fit.

Nothing like a few battle scars eh? Something to tell your grandkids about, that sort of thing...
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Dan McC
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Re: Are you having a fit?

Sun Jul 01, 2012 1:08 am

Well the router gouge kind of demoralized me a bit so I set this project aside for a couple weeks. Finally got back to it recently and fitted a new piece and trimmed it to size. Using the grain line to disguise the joint seemed to work out well. It's OK, the patch is a bit lighter than the rest of the piece, but I am pretty sure that is due to the fact that the patch was freshly cut while the rest of it was cut several months ago and has darkened due to exposure to the air. I expect the patch will also darken over time and the colour match will improve.

Image

Image

So now I am back to where I was several weeks ago!

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