I’m almost finished with a Mission style hall table, and came up with, in my opinion, a great way to make legs with quarter sawn wood on all four sides.
The originals were (as best I can tell from my reading) either solid, with quarter sawn faces on two opposing faces and 1/8th inch QS veneer on the other two sides, or they were made with lock miter bits.
I rejected the veneered approach because you’d be able to see the veneer line, and I rejected the lock miter bit approach because I felt it would be very difficult to get the legs absolutely square … plus I was worried about close (read invisible) glue joints.
What I did was cut the four sides of the leg slightly wider than the finished width. I took two sides, cut a 45 degree rip on each (a Forrest blade on my cabinet saw, done very carefully), place biscuits every 6 inches, and glued them up. I did the same for the other two sides. I then had two glueups that were very, very tight and good looking. To finish the glueup I did the following.
I made a sled for my planer which was 8 feet long and a foot wide. I used my saw (blade at a 45 degree angle) to cut two troughs in it which were really V grooves, about 1.75 inches on a side (each groove was exactly the same depth). The sides of the V groove were at 90 degrees to one another. The glueups laid in the grooves without any play whatsoever, and the glue joint was pointing down. I then placed the legs into the grooves and ran them through my planer, until the sides were the width I desired. Note that the glueups were identical in size after planing. I then used biscuits on both sides of the legs, every 6 inches, and glued the two sides together. With a jig it didn’t take long. The legs are absolutely perfectly square, the size I wanted, and the glue joints are absolutely tight. Read invisible here.
A side benefit to this is that I actually resawed my quarter sawn white oak and bookmatched it, so that the legs actually are pretty well bookmatched all around. They look great.
Comments?
Replies
Sounds interesting. Any chance you could post a picture of the sled?
John O'Connell - JKO Handcrafted Woodworking
Life is tough. It's tougher if you're stupid - John Wayne
I'll see. I don't have a digital camera, but my daughter-in-law is coming for the weekend and may have hers along. Here's something I drew up in Word (very crude) to show the cross section.
John,
Wouldn't a jointer be faster? No jig to build and by doing an equal number of passes per set you're ready to go, not to mention the snipe issue with a planer.
Scott
No, I don't think so. I made the legs longer to account for snipe, but there really wasn't any with the sled (which was 8 feet long and much longer than the legs). And how do you ensure that, with a jointer, you're cutting the glueup at an exact 45 degree to the two edges and are keeping the cuts exactly parallel to the glued-up edge? After making 5 or 6 passes you'd have a tremendous amount of error.
This really went fast, and was extremely accurate. If you're really, really worried about snipe, I'd build the sled and attach (hotmelt glue, probably) other sacrificial boards to the sled (one on each side) which would extend well past the front and back of the legs so that snipe was on those boards, not the legs.
In point of fact, I don't even have a jointer in my shop. I can get a really, really good edge on a board with my cabinet saw (and Forrest blade ... and, no, I have no affiliation with Forrest) and if I have to I place a straight edge on a board and straightline it with a router. Maybe not quite as fast, but just as good.
John
A very creative solution! I'm impressed, and hope you're able to get a picture this weekend for us.
I have some vague memory that perhaps veneered pieces in this type of application have mitered edges to help disguise the 90-degree joint on the edges. I like your solution though.forestgirl -- you can take the girl out of the forest, but you can't take the forest out of the girl ;-)
The digital camera is here (with my daughter-in-law) so I'll get some pictures this weekend. The table is for her for Christmas (she knows it's coming) so I'll use this as an opportunity to show her work in progress.
I'll try to get some pictures of the legs, which are not yet cut. I actually made the legs in pieces that were twice as long as need be, so I could cut that piece in half and get two legs. Hope that makes sense to you. This further reduced the possibility of snipe error and extra cost involved with making them longer.
To further explain this, I filled in the glueup prior to planing so that I'd end up with a solid leg in the end, 2 inches square. I didn't want a hollow center, so that if I needed to I could drill into the bottom of the legs and install recessed levelers.
Also, if you think about it, this technique could be used to make legs that were, say, 8 inches on a side and a full 2 inches thick. A lock miter bit isn't made (at least I've never seen one) that will cut an 8/4 board. This might require a saw with a bigger blade than 10 inches, but that's another story. A reason to get a bigger, better toy?
Lastly, from my reading the QS legs on mission furniture that were veneered were only veneered on the flat sawn face. That would make it impossible to have the glue joint at a 45 degree angle. It would be possible to have 4 pieces of veneer (say, an 8th of an inch thick), cut at a 45 degree angle, but the precision required for that blows me away and would take longer than what I did and probably be much more likely to come apart over time.
John
I think what FG was getting at is that the flatsawn faces were veneered and then a 45 degree chamfer was milled on the corner so that the veneer joint disappears in the chamfer. I have done this several times with great success, and if you plan it right, you can cut the veneer from the leg stock and get book matched legs.
Bill
That description makes sense. I clearly haven't tried it, and don't remember reading about this chamfer. The books I've read suggest cutting the veneer at about an 8th of an inch thick, which would call for a pretty significant chamfer. If I were to veneer, I'd probably go with veneer half as thick to make for a smaller chamfer.
What I don't understand is how you can cut the veneer from the leg, apply it to the other (flat sawn) sides, and get the result bookmatched. It'd be close, but not truly bookmatched, right?
What I did, to get more specific, was to resaw some 4/4 white oak to come up with bookmatched pieces, glue this to other white oak to get the proper thickness, and then proceed. The result is about as close as you can get to bookmatched.
And, why did I resaw the 4/4 white oak, and go to the trouble of a glue-up, you ask, instead of resawing 8/4 white oak? Well, I started by resawing the 8/4 white oak. The wood wasn't kiln dried properly and was really bowed when resawn. I resawed the resultant 4/4 boards and then did the glueup to remove the bow. Not happy, but it worked great.
John
Took awhile, but here are some pictures of the sled. The third picture (wood3.jpg) also has one of the leg pieces. This piece was made long enough for two legs plus extra to account for snipe, etc.
Sorry for the delay. I don't have a digital camera and my daughter-in-law does, but she's also got a 5 month-old son to care for and it took awhile to load the pictures up and send them to me.
John
See the recent reply with the pictures. Sorry for the wait. What do you think?
John
I was wondering if you might go into some more detail or draw a picture on the 45 degree cuts and the biscuits. I cannot picture it in my mind, and possibly reference the quater sawn sides and the flat sawn sides. Thank you very much. Sounds like a great technique.
I'll try to come up with some shop drawings over the weekend and post them. I think my printer has scanning capabilities.
Basically, the biscuits are there to keep the joints aligned and tight. The "slots" are directly into the inside face of the joint and at 90 degrees to the jointed edge, and are parallel to the outside corner. If you take the 45 degree edge, place the "inside" against the front of the biscuit cutter and get the depth right, the slots are perfectly set up to keep the joint aligned and tight.
It's possible that biscuits on 6 inch centers is overkill, but what the heck? Biscuits, when bought by the 1000, are cheap. I'd rather have something like this perfectly aligned and strong.
John
I think where I may be getting confused is when you rip at 45 degrees on the 2 faces. Are you taking your square stock ripping it diagonally thus creating 2 seperate traingles ? Or are you making a rip down the middle of 2 faces at 45 degrees to receive the bisciuts then glueing another piece of stock to that? Or am I still completely off base? Again thanks for any clarification.
OK, I think I understand your question now. I took the two pieces and ripped each one so that one edge (long edge) was at 45 degree. This wasn not a diagonal rip.
Since I needed to make 4 legs, I made them as four sets of two pieces that were twice as long (plus an extra foot for safe measure). I made four glueups from these 8 pieces, as a start. Each glueup was half of a double length table leg. I ran these four glueups through the planer, and then glued two together, and the other two together, to make two "table legs" that, when cut in half, gave me the four legs.
Does this answer this part?
Yep, that did it, thanks alot. Now all I need is to try it
My sled had the sides of the V groove about 1.75 inches long, and the sides of my legs were 2 inches long. I wanted the groove to be as deep as possible to provide the most support. Your dimensions may differ. Good luck. Let us know how you like it.
And the sled was constructed out of a sheet of very flat birch 3/4 inch plywood. Since it's a little less than 12 inches wide, it's 3 inches thick. Very flat and very stable ... but also extremely heavy.
John
Edited 11/15/2002 5:21:21 PM ET by johnhardy
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