charlieb wrote:

The fact that using traditional joinery permits self supporting, self
aligning dry fitting COULD really change WHAT I made became very
apparent while making Das Bench. No matter how much thought I?d put
into the drawings of the bench, there were plenty of things that weren?t
obvious when doing the drawings at 1/4 scale which became obvious upon
dry fitting the actual parts. Design First Then Execute The Plan To The
Letter changed to Start With An Idea And Evolve/ Refine It As I Go.
Traditional joinery use allows for options - and I like to have options.

I've found the same thing to be true as I'm learning different types
of joinery and how to make it with both hand and power tools.
Depending on the project, and if I'm designing it, I do most of the
planing in my head. I will pull out some graph paper and work out
the base dimensions of things, but I leave the details till I get
to that part. For a recent project making a small cabinet, I made
the carcass out of plywood. The project was to be painted so I was
using Poplar to make a face frame to hide the plywood edges. A
year or so ago, I would have just cut out the various pieces of
Poplar and then brad them directly to the plywood carcass, hoping
the various pieces of Poplar would line up nice and tight and not
leave any gaps. This time around, I made the face frame using
mortise and tenon joinery. After getting the frame together and
dry fit, I could then take the whole piece over to the cabinet
carcass, verify it was covering things properly and not overhanging
too much in the wrong places. Where it was overhanging too much,
I could just take the frame apart again and plane off a bit of the
offending piece. When I was satisfied with the way the dry-fit
frame was fitting to the carcass, I put some glue in the mortises,
put the pieces together, put some glue around the back of the frame
and was able to quickly attach it to the carcass with some brads.
The joints in the frame were all tight, no gaps and it looked good.
It obviously took more effort to make the mortises and tenons, but
the end result made it worth the effort.


--

If you want to reply via email, change the obvious words to numbers and
remove ".invalid".