I’ve been a bit under the weather, so not much has gotten done in the workshop.  That’s not all bad, though.  It gave a Douglas Fir post, which I bought to be the top rails on the Japanese-style Saw Horses, more time to acclimate.  A good thing, too: it was sopping wet when purchased, as though left out in the rain for a day or two before the pallet was brought to the rack.

Over the last couple of weeks of drying, the two 36″ lengths that will become the top rails stayed quite straight.  There was barely any twist either.  What did happen, though, was some severe checking on the ends and on one face.  It makes me think the wood was greener than it should have been (or was left out in the rain for a very long time).

This is what happens when wood dries too fast.

None of the checks were structural, nor very deep.  Not even the long check down the face grain seen in the above picture.  That does not mean, however, that they shouldn’t be stabilized.  There will after all be mortises within a couple inches of each end.

My strong preference for stabilizing end grain checking (and knots, for that matter) has always been thin viscosity cyanoacrylate glue.  Like the Ents at Isengard, I just keep pouring CA glue into the checks until the gaps are filled and the bubbling stops.  Then I give it about five minutes to set before I seal it up with spray activator.

It looks gross, but it works.

I will let those sit for a day or two to fully harden inside, then I’ll square up the ends with a chop saw.  The end result should be pristine end grain and clean glue lines in the stabilized checks.

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If you follow me on Twitter, you may know that I spent most of #blizzard2016 hand-cutting mitered half lap joints for a cherry side table.  The finished piece will have eight such joints, and although I’m only about halfway through the first of two frames, I’d like to reflect a bit on the process.

The goal is to have four each of these.

First off, some defined terms.  For the duration of this post, I will refer to the lower piece in the picture above (the E-G piece) as the “Angled Piece”.  The upper piece in the picture (the E-F piece) will henceforth be known as the “Recessed Piece”.  I’m sure they have proper names that have no relevance to what I’m about to say.

On each Angled Piece, there are three cuts to make.  The first two apply to all lap joints: a shoulder crosscut and a cheek rip cut.  The third is unique to the mitered half lap: a 45° miter cut across the face. My preferred order is (i) cheek, (ii) shoulder, (iii) miter, but whatever you do, always make the cheek rip BEFORE you cut the miter.   Otherwise, you will lose your guiding kerf on the rest of the rip as you get to full depth.

Don’t be a hero.  Start with the easy cut.

Once all three cuts are made, and after the cheek is flat and parallel to the face (whether off the saw or by router plane), it’s time to square the shoulder to the reference edge by paring down to the knife line.  Then is the most critical step: true the miter to 45° using the same reference edge to which the shoulder was squared.

When I cut the first joint, I thought to just straighten the miter, transfer the mark to the Recessed Piece and leave well enough alone.  After all, it doesn’t have to be perfect; it just has to be consistent.  Since my shoulder was square, this would have worked fine, assuming I sawed perfectly and my full knife line was intact.  But alas, the saw jumped out of the kerf and took part of my knife line with it.  So fitting the joint became trial and error angle finding with a shoulder plane.

If you instead true the miter to 45°, go ahead and still use the Angled Piece to transfer the mark to the Recessed Piece (it’s easier than using a combination square).  But if you saw less than perfectly, you can always fall back on just truing the mitered recess to 45°.  With a straight edge on the Recessed Piece and a square shoulder on the Angled Piece, everything will come together perfectly either way.

Like this, but without half an hour of shoulder planing.

One more thing: depending on how much material you remove from the miter on the Angled Piece getting it to 45°, you may need a couple passes on the shoulder to bring it back in plane with the end of the miter.  Otherwise, your inside corners won’t meet right at the miter.

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Last night, I had a nightmare that all my chisels had rusted over and bellied.  So this morning, during my breakfast of mini-bagel and green tea, I made sure they had not.  I actually only got through 1/4-5/8, and will do the rest tonight.

Screw you, subconscious.

I love my 3×8 diamond plates for grinding and sharpening, but they are not ideal for lapping and flattening.  When I need something perfectly flat, I turn instead to the machinist’s granite slab pictured above and adhesive-backed sandpaper of various coarseness.

For flattening chisels or plane irons, I typically use 80 grit, 120 grit and 220 grit sandpaper.  I care more about flatness than mirror polish, so any additional polishing done on the diamond plates in the course of sharpening.  For plane soles, I might go up to 320 grit (which is overkill for everything but a smoothing plane, I know).

I’ve experimented with sanding belts and spray adhesive in the past, but I’m never happy with the adhesion, and certainly loathe the mineral-spirits cleanup of the spray adhesive.  With adhesive-backed sandpaper, I just need a scraper and a spritz of Simple Green cleaner.  The grit on the sanding belts definitely lasts longer, but it’s a small price to pay.

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