trestle part 1

Well, OK then! Now that the legs are cut to length, time to put the stretchers together.

I'm making the stretchers out of, GET THIS, reclaimed 2x10's I found at the architectural salvage site. some were reasonably straight but had some cup and wind in them that needed to be attended to. I first ripped them down to 6" wide with my skillsaw trick, and roughed them to flat with my scrub plane, then finished with a jack plane. The scrub plane got a lot of miles in today



I've mapped out the joints into the legs to look kind of like so: 1,1/4" thick tennons, 2" deep:



The stretchers will consist of a lamination of the above boards, looking like so:



I based the dimensions on how the legs lay up against the edges of the bottom of the top here. The critical one to measure out here is the tennon shoulder of the outside part of the stretcher lamination. It's close, but of course not perfect.

I'll have to fiddlefart a bit to get the two ends of the trestle close before mortising and drawboring. But my plan is to get the ends fitted and glued up first, and then I'll be able to have them set up for the more awkward fitment of the longer stretchers later. Make sense?



Back to the mortising! eeks, even with a 1,1/4 auger bit, bashing away 6”x1,1/4”x2” deep mortises is a workout. I don’t do them much so it’s good practice.



Doug fir seems to get harder with age, or rather the the late summer, slow growing part of the rings seems to get harder. Here, the ossified rings feel almost crystalline against the chissel.



after a lot of shoulder pairing (I should have been a bit more careful with the shoulder cutting in the first plae), the joints close up fairly well. The gap-filing capabilities of Titebond III will be explored here.

I did NOT drawbore these pegs since I have a wide enough clamp to hold the end pieces together.



The second pair of legs went together much like the first, but now I had something to build them off which helped with making the alignment decisions.



OK it’s now time to stitch the two lateral sections together with some beefy stretchers.

Once the end assemblies were finished, I went for the long stretchers, but before laminating them up, I clamped the boards up to the base to mark off the tennon shoulders like so:



Then, after marking and cutting the shoulders, and then laminating the stretchers, i tested fitment of the assembly like so, note the temporary cleats I screwed onto the tennons to hold the clamps in tension. worked okay but was awkward with only one pair of hands. I think Rube Goldberg would approve: