This week has been HUGE at M. T. Acres!
It started with Tina getting the baseboard moldings varnished for the guest bedroom. Then I got them installed, with the help of Belle of course.
Tina varnished a few more sticks of molding than I needed for the guest bedroom, so I decided to just use up what she had varnished in the guest hallway and part of the main hallway.
I think I did a pretty good job getting the outside corners to match up as well.
With the guest bedroom done and my office done, Tina was able to spend the rest of the week attacking the big pile of stuff we had stored in the living room.
When we got the occupancy certificate for M. T. Acres and moved from the rental house, we did not bother to unpack many boxes since we are still working on the house. So we just made a great big pile of furniture and boxes in the living room to keep the rooms we were working on empty. Most of the boxes had not been opened since we packed them in Minnesota. We literally had a path about 18 inches wide going from the door of the master bedroom to the kitchen/dining area. The rest was pretty much, floor-to-ceiling boxes and furniture!
With two good sized rooms now done, Tina was able to work her butt off to get things actually unpacked and moved into my office and the guest bedroom, and more importantly, get the pile in the living room gone!
This is wonderful! It is the first time M. T. Acres has felt like a “home” rather than just another “work in progress”. As I write this, Tina is sitting in the living room, which is empty except for the stuff that belongs in living room, watching a DVD on our real TV connected up to our real sound system!
For my part, I started on making the doors for the kitchen cabinets. Normally kitchen cabinet panel doors are pretty easy to make because the stiles (the vertical pieces) and the rails (the horizontal pieces) joined using a cope & stick joint. That joint only requires a matched set of router bits and 2 passes on the router table to make the completed joint.
The problem with it is you can only give the doors a profile of one of the 6 or 8 profiles they make router bit sets for.
We want to minimize the fillets and ogees (grooves, etc.) that can collect grease and dust due to living in the desert. Also, since all of the top doors are going to have glass panels, we need the doors to be strong. So I opted to use an old furniture-maker’s joint called a mitre & mortise joint. The mitre & mortise joint is a complex joint, but it can mostly be cut with the table saw and only requires hand work with a bench chisel to clean up the cuts and do the final fitting of the joint.
Before I started on the doors however, I decided to make jig to make it easier to cut the joints. I decided to call the jig Barbie because she loves to be accessorized.
Next, I decided to make an “accessory” to allow me to make cross-grain cuts with a stop on the left side of the saw blade. This allows me to use the same setup regardless of how long or short the rails and stiles are.
The next “accessory” was a fence to allow me to make very accurate rip cuts.
Finally, I made an accessory for cutting tenons.
As you will in next few minutes, Barbie turned out to be a great thing. However, I am left feeling pretty stupid for not figuring out to make it 15 years ago!
On to doing the joinery…
The first thing I did was cut the mortises in the stiles. This is one of the few cuts in this joint where I had some wiggle room on cutting it accurately.
Next I cut the mitres on the stiles, then the rails. These have to be exactly 45 degrees and the depth of the cut has to be exactly 3/8″. Also the location of the cut on the stiles has to be exactly 2 3/8″ from the end of the stiles (because the stock is a total of 2 3/8″ wide) and 1 3/8″ from the end of the rails (because I am using 1″ tenons).
Then I set the saw blade to 90 degrees and cut the shoulders for the tenons on the rails.
The placement and depth of the cut must be extremely precise. Anytime I need a cut to be extremely precise, I always cut it a little bit short and do the final fitting with a chisel.
Then I changed the saw blade to a rip blade and setup Barbie for the vertical cuts. I started by trimming down to the top of the mitre on the stiles.
Next I cut the outside, then inside haunches around the tenons on the rails.
Finally, I dressed Barbie with her tenoning “accessory” and cut the tenons.
After spending a day and a half cleaning and fitting each joint with a bench chisel, I was able to dry fit the joint together and see how they are going to look.
Obviously, I am pretty dang happy with how tight they came out!
Once I was confident all of the joinery is going to fit together, I was able to cut the dados to hold the flat panels on the bottom doors and the rabbits to hold the glass on the top doors.
Finally, I routed the decorative edge on the insides on all of the rails and stiles and did a final dry fitting.
I am pretty pleased with myself for how these are coming out. I have not done any “fine woodworking” in about 2 1/2 years and the last time I did, it was sloppier than what I like. So I was concerned that maybe my skills were diminishing. But after doing these, I am confident that my skills are still there.
One comment on “Meet Barbie!”
Loved the bookcases and the dog in the closet. The house is really coming together. And yes Tina does good work.