The Benchmaker's Apprentice: Cutting Mortises and Chopping Legs(Wooden Ones)

Preparing to cut mortises for our legs on this big mortising machine. Nothing real complicated (that's usually how cheating works).



After all that horribly difficult work, I cleaned up the mortiser's work with a Lie-Nielsen 1/2" chisel.

Now that those mortises are done, I moved on to chop down all the rails to width.


The rails are all the correct width now, but they still need some length adjustment, specifically so that they are shorter.

Had to get rid of some nasty snipe the planer left behind. Not too shabby.

All rails cut to length.

Now we need to plane the boards so they are smooth and, of course, square.

I had a little problem with this board. As you may be able to see in the picture, I drew with my pencil where the board was not square and needed planing, back right corner and the front left corner.

To fix this problem, I took my plane and pinched the front, using my index finger on the bottom as a fence and took a shaving from the back right edge started the cut from the middle of the board and let the plane take a shaving about 1/4" in and slowly moved towards the center using the finger fence until I had slowly planed about 3/4" in.

I repeated this process on the back left corner stopping my cut half way down the board, similar to before. Finally, I took a full pass and sure enough, the board was darn near perfect square. Not bad, for an apprentice.