Wood. Food. More.

Building a Cane #5: Mortise cleanup and Trimming the trim

Another hour in the shop this morning. Trimmed the layer of granadillo after marking the rough diameter I plan to finish it to. Not perfect, but close enough, I hope.

1) make a stick that fits tightly in the mortise, and fine-tune the mortise. It’s really easy to have the mortise too small in the middle, and only discover that when everything has glue on it, which it too late to be fixing that problem.

Using a rectangular stick to check the inside of the mortise

2) scribe a circle roughly the diameter of the finished shaft. My dividers did a good enough job, but I came back and added a pencil line to reduce the chances of a mistake.

Scribing a circle the approximate size of the shaft so I can begin roughing the joint between the handle and the shaft

3) inspect the circle. Yup! Looks round enough.

The scribed circle with nothing in the way, so I can see if it's right

4) use a dovetail saw to make angled cuts in the excess, then chisel away the excess to the cut lines. More cleanup to be done yet, but this is good enough that I can shape the handle without getting into trouble by removing too much of the granadillo.

I've removed some of the excess collar using a dovetail saw and chisel

And that’s it for this morning. Hoping to have a neighbor help me cut the shafts this afternoon.

Micro-update: The shafts are cut. My neighbor stopped by and helped cut a 1¼ inch by 12/4 x 4 foot strip off the edge of my ash slab. I cut that into two shafts, marked the tenons on them, deciding grain direction and which end is up and such, and then called it an evening after just a half-hour. Will double check my math before cutting the tenons tomorrow morning.

Discuss...
Reply to this in the fediverse: @davepolaschek@writing.exchange