Joinery and veneers. DOH!

It's been a busy week in the shop!

My veneers finally arrived for the center panels.

This  veneer is crotch mahogany.  It is 1/32 of an inch thick.  (The picture above actually has two slices on top of each other.)  Because the grain of the wood is so varied, it wrinkles and crinkles when sliced this thin.

The veneer must be glued to a substrate.  The substrate is a panel of 3/4" MDF (medium density fiberboard).  First, I have to glue a layer of poplar veneer onto the panel sideways, and then the mahogany veneer will be glued vertically over the poplar.  Because the poplar grain will be glued perpendicular to the mahogany, it is called "crossbanding," and it will keep the panel stable.  Here's the poplar veneer, which is also 1/32" thick.

The slices of veneer first must be taped together so that they will completely cover the panel.  I use a special veneer tape (it's got a real fancy name -- "veneer tape"), which comes off easily when moistened.  Once the veneer is taped, I glue it to the panel using a veneer glue and a vacuum press to clamp the veneer down consistently.  

 Here is the panel with the poplar veneer glued on, and the veneer tape still in place but starting to peel off.  Notice the unsightly gap between the poplar panels at the end.  Whoops.  No big deal.  It'll cut off.  Also, it'll be completely covered by the mahogany veneer.

The next step is to flatten the mahogany.  I spray it with a veneer softener (basically water and glycerine), and then clamp it between two MDF boards overnight.  The spray shows how colorful the veneer will look when it is finished.

See how the last piece of veneer is floating in mid-air?  That's one of the magical properties of veneer.  It floats.  In mid-air.  It's because it's only 1/32 of an inch thick.  So it's lighter than the surrounding air, which makes it float like that.

Once I've flattened it, then I have to carefully trim a flat edge on each piece and then tape them together.  Here's one taped up pair:

The next step was to glue the veneer to the panel, then cut the panel to its final dimensions.  And this is the part that I messed up.  I've avoid making any major mistakes in the project up until this point, but here is where I made a huge mistake.  Can you see it?  Maybe just a little bit?

Yep, look at how wide the right piece of veneer is, and how narrow the left piece is.  I carefully measured exactly how much I needed to cut off of each side, and then I cut the left side twice.  DOH!

While I don't make many mistakes in woodworking, I invariably make one big mistake on almost every project.  Inevitably, it happens on the most expensive piece of material in the project.  (The veneer and supplies it took to make this panel cost about $300.)  And inevitably, it happens after I've already invested numerous hours getting the piece almost final.

When you make a huge mistake like this, you have three options.  One is to figure that the piece is much too expensive and took too much work to get this far, so go ahead and use it as is.  If you adopt that attitude, your woodworking will always turn out funky looking.  Another option is to start over.  I would normally do that, but this was a pretty expensive panel.  The third option is a design change.  After giving it a lot of thought, I've come up with a repair and a design change that will work just fine.  I glued one of the cut-off pieces back onto the left side, and while the repair isn't invisible, it is structurally sound.  I will now cut off an equal amount from the other side, and then hide the repair by stretching the two spindles that go on either side of the panel by 1/4" each.  That process is still underway, but I'll take some pictures later, and you'll see that it will be impossible to tell I ever made a mistake in the first place.

The rest of the headboard and footboard has gone much smoother.  I finished the joinery for the bottom rail on the footboard.  I ended up using a combination of my tablesaw, handsaws, chisels and handplanes to cut the tenons.  The goal is to get a joint tight enough that it the joint holds the pieces together without the need of glue.  Here is the bottom rail resting on the workbench, with the leg in place.  You can see that the joint is strong enough to hold the material together without glue, even though that's a pretty hefty chunk of mahogany hanging off the side of the rail in mid-air.  (And yes, unlike the veneer, this one really is hanging in mid-air, supported only by the joint to the rail.)

Here's a close-up of the joint.  We want a perfect fit, without gaps.  There's just a hair of a gap at the top, but the top will cut off, so that won't be visible:

With the footboard rail milled and the jointery complete, it's on to the headboard.  The headboard is very large -- considerably bigger than the footboard  --and I had to mill three large boards for the bottom rails.

Here's the three bottom rails milled and joined to one leg, with Jill on the side to give you a sense of proportion:

Now, the picture above makes you realize there are three kinds of men in the world:

1)  Men who look at the above picture and say, "Hey, that's a pretty cool looking headboard."

2)  Men who look at the above picture and say, "Hey, Jill's kinda cute."

3)  Men who look at the above picture and say, "Hey, how big is that TV hanging on the wall in your workshop?"

Which one did you notice first?

Once I wrapped up the mortise and tenon joints on the other side of the bottom rails, the next step was to cut the joinery for the top rail.  The top rail is very complex.  It connects to the legs with a miter joint, which I reinforce with loose tenons.  Then there is a graceful curve with cloudlifts on both the top and bottom of the rail.  Finally, there are numerous mortises to accept the spindles that span between the top and bottom rails, as well as the panel.  Those spindle joints are the most complex on the entire project.  The bottom edge of the top rail is an uneven shape, and yet there can be no gap between that edge and the top of each spindle.  I've seen other people develop complicated jigs for cutting the spindles to mate perfectly to the top rail, but I can't imagine doing that without a CNC router.  So I'm taking a very different approach.  I'm using my multi-router to cut sockets into the upper rail that will provide a perfect slot into which I can slide the entire top of the spindle.  This will result in a gapless joint.

Pictures are easier to follow than words, so here's a picture of the top rail in my multi-router.  You can see several mortises cut into the bottom of the rail.  The corners of the mortises are round for now, because the router bit is round.  But I will square those up with a chisel .

The multi-router is a life-saver.  Without it, I would have had to use a chisel and mallet to chop these mortises, because the rail is too large for my mortising machine.  It would have taken me at least an afternoon.  The multi-router took about an hour, and nearly all of that time was set-up.

Note that the top of the top rail is not cut out yet.  I had to leave it flat for now so that I could register the flat side against the stops on my multi-router, otherwise there would be no way to get the mortises perfectly straight up and down on all those curved surfaces.

In addition to all of this, Jill is wrapping up all of those ebony plugs and getting them ready to inlay once the headboard and footboard are glued up.  Here's what a boatload of ebony plugs looks like:

Next step:  Matching mortises on the bottom rail, milling the spindles, and then lots of sanding before gluing it all together.