Thorsen Side Table #3: Some Progress

I was out of town for four days and fell behind on my schedule.

I cut 30 mortises for the pegs last night. I received some tips from Karson on the making, assembly and finishing the pegs. Thanks Karson.

Don gave me a tip on the pegs. He suggested obtaining the Darrel Peart book: Greene & Greene Design Elements for the Workshop. It arrived yesterday. I read the first 7 chapters and am now starting on the design elements section. This book is absolutley great and I highly recommend it if you want to further your knowledge of Greene & Greene furniture. The book certainly will help me finish this project. Don – many, many, many thanks. There are quite a few tips that I will keep secret and use on my table. LOL

I made new stretchers since the last ones were about 1/4” short. I really like the cloud lifts and saw the emphasis in the Greene & Greene furniture book.

Tonight will be spent in cleaning up the peg mortises. Then the next step will be sanding, making pegs, assembly and finishing. Looking forward, I really hope I can meet the deadline. Due to the limited amount of time I can spend on this project I will not be able to enter the shop video challenge.

So far, I have really improved my skills on using mortise and tenon joinery. For the mortises, except for the pegs, I use a plunge router with my new jig. Since I don’t have a tenoning jig, I use the router table to make the tenons but first I make the initial face and cheek cuts on the table saw. After a great amount of trial and error I can now make pretty good tenons.

My daughter took off last week to visit her boyfriend in England and took my camera. So no pictures to share until after May 20 when she returns.

I hope everyone else is making good progress on their table. Since there seems to be a limited amount of finished projects and some who refuse to share their progress, you know who you are, I suspect that between May 28 and May 31 there will be a flood of completed projects.

I can’t wait to leave work so I can return to the shop.

Good luck everyone.

-- Fred Childs, Pasadena, CA - - - Law of the Workshop: Any tool, when dropped, will roll to the least accessible corner.