Good shop day, bad shop day

We had a great time on our little trip. My Dad had some extra time after we unloaded the car, so he stuck around to help me rough cut parts and surface everything. After he left, I glued-up the board for one top, cut most of the other parts to size (with the exception of the legs, which I still had to rip out of the blocks of 8/4 that we had surfaced earlier), and did the trick with one of the apron pieces to slice the drawer front out of the middle of the board. I was pretty happy with myself.

Today, I went down and marked for mortises, cut a test mortise and tenon, and then set about cutting the rest of the tenons. I don’t have a tenoning jig for the tablesaw, so I usually use a combination of the bandsaw and tablesaw to cut everything to size. Everything went swimmingly. I had the legs marked-out to cut the mortises using the drill press and hand chisel clean-up method. I was intending to do a two-sided taper on the legs, but I wanted to cut the joinery and do a dry-fit before I cut the tapers.

Here’s where things started going south. I had some issues using my drill press to cut mortises in white oak when I built my storm door a while ago. It just doesn’t have a whole lot of power. It’s an import that was bought as a gift for me from a local "tool sale" event. It has served me well, until today. I was cutting using the slowest speed available (recommended for the bit I was using), and making sure that I pulled-back to clean-out the chips and let the bit cool pretty often. Well, at the bottom of one of the holes, I heard a "zzzzt" from the motor. It seized, then let out the magic smoke (or, rather, the bad-electrical-winding-burning smell). It was clear at this point that I would be cutting no more mortises today–at least not the easy way.

I went upstairs to check on the local woodworking stores to see how late they were open, hoping to score a hollow-chisel mortiser. I missed both of them by 20 minutes. Argh.

After I calmed down a bit, I ordered a pizza for Jenny and me, and we had some dinner. After dinner, I figured I’d go back down to the shop and do a few other things, then clean up for the night. I cut the top panel to size, then dry-fit a few of the mortises that I had cut already to see how they looked.

ARGH!

I forgot to take the width of the legs into account when I did the math to figure out the length of the aprons. All of the aprons were about 3-1/2" too long.

I marked one apron to use as a template so that I can cut the other three to size. I’ll have to "play" with the drawer-side apron a bit to see if it will still look right after it is shortened.