woodworking plans computer desk

marc:on today's show we're going to make a unique sculpted trestle table. (groovy brass music) trestle tables are one ofthe earliest table forms known to man and theyconsist of three parts: the trestle legs, thecross member, and the top. even my workbench here is an example of a trestle table, let's take a closer look. as you can see all of theprimary parts are here,

we've got the trestlelegs, one on each end. i've got a cross member inthe middle and that provides a lot of rigidity and stopsthe whole thing from wracking. of course we're got our top here. the top is a lot thickerthan you might normally have on a trestle table but thisis a workbench so it has to be thicker, but essentiallythe basic form is here, this is nothing more than a trestle table. although the conceptand the principle behind

a trestle table is fairlysimple you don't want to let that limit younecessarily in your imagination and the things that youbring to your own table. in this case i'm goingto take influence from a lot of maloof thingsthat i've seen in the past. sam maloof just had a way of combining parts with his furniture. not just his chairs buthis tables and desks that just was so fluid, onepiece just blends right

into the next piece andyou really have to look closely just to figureout where the joint is. that's what we're going for with this piece, a very fluid design. in fact it's remindingme of the end table that we made probably a coupleyears ago at this point, the sculpted end table serieswhere i had to blend the legs into the cross members forthis little occasional table. it may be worth going back and reviewing

those episodes beforewatching all of these. but of course any designis completely flawed if it doesn't satisfyits intended function. let's talk about that a little bit. we're going to head tomy bedroom actually, and i'm going to showyou where this table is going to go and whatwe're going to use it for. this is where the table is going to go. it's actually replacing a computer desk.

i hesitate to call this projecta desk because i don't want to give the impression thatwe need all the normal storage things that you might need ina good quality computer desk. this really is allabout comfort and style. these are our gaming computers,we don't do any work in here. we strictly play games. nicole and i will go online and we may spend hours on a particular evening which means a lot of times, we eat meals here.

when we're sittingside-by-side this table doesn't really give us enough roomto do that comfortably. we're going to have togo a little bit longer, we're going to have togo a little bit deeper, but what we don't reallyneed is all the other storage and things that you mightnormally put into a desk. the trestle table isreally nice because it gives us a lot of legroom, there's not a whole lot of desk that doesn't need to be there.

it's very minimalistic and we think it's going to work perfectlyfor our gaming rigs. now let's head back to the shop. now we know the function, weknow the location and we've even got a few restrictiveparameters like the length, the depth, things -- eventhe height -- that are going to lock down this designinto a particular box. then within that box wehave an infinite number of things that we can do tosatisfy the basic function.

now it comes down to taste,it comes down to what i think looks good and what i thinkwill be a fun project to build. that's where i simply take a pencil and a piece of paper and i start drawing. this is nothing more than basic ideas, basic sketches, very rough. you don't have to begood at art at this point because you're reallyjust having fun with it. get the basic structure downso you have an idea what

looks good and what doesn'tlook good, and we'll answer the question ofwhether it works or not later. right now the mostimportant thing is to get those ideas out of yourhead and onto the paper. after creating three orfour different concepts there was one thatreally stood out from the rest for me and it wasthe one that really got the message across thati was going for here. nice fluid curves all over, the top, the

bottom and a vertical leg that tilts back to provide a really nice visual interest. the trick at this point is to take this little drawing and tosomehow blow it up to scale because we want to see it full size. you could, i guess, take thislittle picture and photocopy and blow it up into multiplepieces of paper and lay them all out so that you'vegot the full-size drawing, but for me i actually get a lotout of that drawing process.

using this as my modeland then i hand sketch it onto a larger full-sizepiece of template stock. in this case i've got some quarterinch mdf which works great. you could use quarter inchply to do this as well. the process of sketchingby hand and modifying these curves and manipulating the drawing, that's part of my creative process. i enjoy it and it really helpsme get closer to the work, and makes sure that this piece is designed

exactly the way i want it to be designed. i'm going to go overthis very quickly because i did spent a lot of timeon making these templates in the end table seriesbut i want to show you for this particular designwhat my strategy was. then we'll jump ahead and start with the actual cutting of the real pieces. since this is just a demonstrationi'm going to be using a big fat sharpie so youcould see everything that i do

but obviously when you'redoing this type of work in your shop a good sharppencil is the way to go. the first thing we're goingto try to accomplish here is putting the building blocksof this structure in place. i'm not worried about curvesyet, that's not really important. what i want is to getthe basic shapes in place so i can have some things to work off of. i know based on my topbeing 24 inches from front to back that i want mylegs to be -- i don't know,

it's flexible, it's whatever you want it to be but i'm thinking 18 to 20 inches. let's start with 18 and i'mgoing to place a mark over here. that's my starting point,and i'll measure over. 18 inches is right about there. this is the front andthe back of the foot. i'm going to use my tsquare to extend that line and i'll put a markhere with my pencil. i don't want that mark to be permanent,

this is just a reference line.you'll see why in a second. i can flip my t square over and accurately get my otherreference line over here. now we can actually use marker. this is all rough here so we'renot looking for perfection. i've got the front andthe back of my bottom, the front and the back of my top. i know the bottom piece,i'm thinking from the bottom of the feet to thepoint where it joins the

vertical piece it's goingto be about six inches. i've got my adjustable square set for six. let's draw that guy in there. i know that i want somekind of curvature from this point down so i'm not going to worry about drawing the line all the way across. the top, let me just double check. i believe the top iwanted to be four inches. let's draw that in.

now we've got our four inch line. again this one is going toreceive some sort of something here, we're just not sureyet, we don't need to be. we also want to make sure that we have our vertical piece connecting these two. this is where you could have a little bit of fun with it because your vertical piece technically could be perfectly straight. you could angle it a little bit,

you could angle it severely, but keep in mind thesteeper this angle is the more stress you're goingto have on these joints, so you do need to be careful there. i was guessing at about 90 degrees. you can get a protractorout for this if you'd like and make sure thatthis is set at 90 degrees but right now i'm just ballparking it. again if it was in pencil we'dbe able to erase all of this.

let's say right about there. and we'll go with about atwo inch wide vertical piece. this straight edge happensto be about two inches so i'm going to use that for reference. the top piece we have one morething we can draw in here. the top piece is going to bea little bit less visually interesting than the bottombecause it doesn't need to be. a lot of it is going to be hidden on the underside of the table.

one thing that we can do istake our adjustable again, and i've got that set atan inch and three quarters. i'm going to draw that in here. draw it in here as well. you can see what we have todeal with here is this vertical portion here needs to blendin to this area over here. we've got a disconnect here as well, we want that to be rounded over. if this were a pencil thisbecome very easy because

now you can just startsketching in like this. draw these things in and get a visual reference for what you're actually trying to get to. we need to connect from here to here now. now how you do that, againcompletely up to you, but let's start by just roughlysketching some things in. you see what i do, this method here, which just works for me,this is nothing official.

i plant my palm, at leastthe side of my palm here, down and i use that asalmost a pivot point so that i can make a nice even curve. i'm not left handed soit's a little bit trickier to do when you're doinga left handed curve but you can still very carefullydraw these things in. that needs to come in a little bit. i don't mind going wide here because i could always come back with my eraser

and start removing thingsto really refine it. that establishes thebasic idea for the top. let's take a look at the bottom. this is where personaltaste comes in to play. sky is the limit here, literally. you can do anything withhow this resolves itself. here's what i'm going todo, just off the top of my head i'm thinking maybe atwo inch foot at the front, a three inch foot at the back,

and these two are going to be connected with some kind of curve. we're not 100 percent on thatyet but let's just draw it in. again pencil would make thisa whole lot less permanent. this part has to now curvein to the body of the foot and terminate downhere so let's very roughly and very lightly start to draw in a curve. this is an inside curve that's going to transition to an outside curve, like that.

let's do the same thingon this side except for this one is a little bit longer. let's bring it in. you should probably tryto match the thickness of this area to the thicknessof this area, so you're going to have to play withthese curves a little bit, but i'm going to draw itin the way i was going. you could simply terminate this down but what if you addedanother inside curve real

quick and then terminate it down there. bring that guy down. this needs work but youcould see where it's going, it gives it a little bit moreof a foot if you're going for almost a look that's reminiscentof an animal's paw perhaps. you could really have some fun with this. at this stage all thesepencil marks in here and you could really start to scribblein, erase, scribble, erase. it's really a back andforth game until you

end up with somethingyou think looks great. for instance in here this is now seeming too thick so i would probably bring this in a little bit more and bring that down. i would just erase this line here. to me that looks alittle bit more pleasing. frankly i'm not reallyhappy with this curve. i might say forget it,let's bring this guy down, and have it terminate like so.

this curve down at the bottom actually has a little bit more impactthan you might think. if this curve comes up a little bit and then back down look at the dramaticdifference that makes. in fact from my vantage point here almost makes this looks like abird's talons in a way, or a chicken, which would be funny. anyway you get the ideawhere we're going here.

the final thing that i wantis this vertical divider, i don't want that tobe perfectly straight. ideally what i want to do isgive it a nice subtle curve. that's actually way too much. i'm trying to give you the idea here. little subtle curvatureacross the whole thing. now that i look at this istart realize that maybe this is going to be notwide enough, because if i'm going to curve it ina little bit it's going

to be a little bit toonarrow for this table. i may have to bring this outand widen the whole thing, and then when i bringmy curve in i'll be left with enough material that it's substantial enough and not realspindley and skinny looking. for the most part this is how this part of the process works for me. the next thing i'll dois i'll come back to the drawing and after i have avery basic idea i will take my

french curve and tryand use that to match up as close as possible towhat i thought looked good. the french curve justhas naturally pleasing asymmetric curves soif i can manage to get these close and overridewhat i had in there by eye the end result willbe much more consistent. you can see, a french curve like this can pretty much match anypart of this curve that we need it to, just get creative with it.

move it around, experiment and have fun. you're going to be doing a lot of erasing and a lot of redrawing. now i want to skip astep. i want to show you what i've already doneso far and catch you up. i did this process and i alreadycreated a set of templates. and you can see, just my approximation drawing that i did was pretty close. it's not that far off from what i actually

drew and then cut out for my templates. i was pretty happy with this. went through the entire processand i even built a prototype. let me show that to you. i basically took my three templates, used some poplar thati had sitting around, some eight quarter and six quarter, and made the three individual parts and connected them to one another.

this is what we've got. from this angle, from this vantage point it doesn't look too bad. the curves are where i need them to be. it still needs a little bit of work, we'll have to do some roundovers. this looked okay. whatcaused me reason for concern here was when ilooked at it from this angle. the problem is this is a92 inch long table top.

these legs are going to look like sticks. to make matters worsewhen we do the sculpting we're going to round overa lot of this material. there's going to be a lotof sculpting going on which means what looks thin now isonly going to get thinner. i think if we made thetable like this it would be disastrous because it would look like this beautiful tabletop onthese little spindley legs. again, this profile, not so bad.

when you view it from this angle, no good. eight quarter is notgoing to be wide enough. the eight quarterthickness once milled comes down to about an inch and three quarters. an inch and three quartersis just not enough. we're going to have to glueup wood to get a thicker piece or i'm going to haveto try and track down some 12 quarter so that we havea substantially thicker foot and top here as wellas the center portion.

that's just the way it goes. the other thing is lookingat everything here i decided that the foot is probablya little bit too thin, this is a little bit too thin once i do all the sculpting and rounding over. overall this entire pieceneeds to be blown up. it literally could be scaled up by about maybe a quarter inch in every dimension, i think we'll be rightwhere we need to be.

add to that using thicker material and i think we're going to have it dead on. let me show you the process of creating what will be now myfinal template now that we've learned somethingfrom this prototype. i took my round onetemplates, basically and put them on another pieceof quarter inch mdf. clamp them in place sothey're not going to move. get these as lined up as you can here.

once everything is inplace i knew i wanted to add at least a quarter inch in all dimensions so a compassworks great for this. i just trace around andput the shape in place. the problem was when i was done i realized that i wasn't completely happy. let's take a close look at the bottom and i'll show you a real good example. once i added my quarterinch in each dimension i

wasn't really happy withthe way that it looked and i needed to give it just alittle bit more something. this looked okay and on a smallerscale table probably would be fine but what i thoughtwas a little whimsical and charming to an extent now startsto look a little bit sickly. if it's animal-like it'scertainly an emaciated animal, i really didn't likethe way it turned out. when i had that extra quarterinch in each dimension it was getting me close but ithought i could do better.

i figured, you know what,let's get rid of this second inside curve here,i don't really like that. let's just give it a nice, smooth, almost bulbous look to the feet here. this is what i came up with. you also notice it's longer. this was 18 inches, now we have 20. i thought that the stubbiness of the front part of the foot was excessively short.

i think i realized that i wanted a little bit more length there. most of that increase to 20 was given to the front of the piece. here's what i came up with. to me, once this issculpted and it's made out of 12 quarter stock it'sgoing to be amazing. i'm really happy with thisfinal design, overall the curves are just a lot nicer,at least in my opinion.

it's going to be a lot offun to make so the next step is to decide wheredo we cut the top and bottom and then we cancut the template out. on the previous design sixinches was enough to cover this because this has tothin out to the middle piece, not just in the dimension of these curves but also in thickness. if this is going to be madefrom 12 quarter stock i'm going to make this middlepiece from eight quarter stock,

so we'll have to transitionthis almost as an ankle. it's a very thick ankle though,it's more like a cankle. we need to trim it in away that looks natural. if we cut this angle, if we cut the cankle too short it's not going to look right. we need to make sure that thisbottom piece goes up pretty high so that we could trimit down as it blends in. before we had six inches andit would have ended right here. i don't think that's farenough, i think we're

going to have to go fora full seven inches here. our bottom piece will needto be cut out of what is basically a seven inch by 20inch blank of 12 quarter stock. that's a lot of meat. now at the top, previouslywe had four inches. i think we can get awaywith four inches again. really all i've done isincrease by a quarter inch on this outside edge and a halfinch at the bottom to make these parts here a littlebit more substantial as well.

i think four inch will beperfectly fine for this one. as you can see again we'reletting the ankle build up a little bit so that wecan thin it out and it will blend in nicely with thethinner vertical piece. just to avoid confusioni just want to point out here what i'm talkingabout when i'm referencing tapering from a thickerpiece to a thinner piece. notice this eight inch ledge here? we're going to need totaper this up so that

it eventually gets down to an eight inch. i think it's going to lookreally cool and in fact, on the final piece i mayhave that ledge be as much as a quarter inch, and that'swhy we need enough material here to taper up so thatit looks like it naturally blends from a thick foot toa thinner vertical piece. enough talking, enough prep work. let's put some toxic dust in the air. (groovy synth music)

at the table saw i cut the topand the bottom pieces away. then using my track saw i cut the 80 degree angle for the vertical template. now i can use the tablesaw to make a parallel cut which reveals the vertical template. at the band saw i cut as close to my pencil line as possiblewithout going over. finally the oscillatingspindle sander makes quick work of finessing the final curves.

before i cut the curves inmy vertical piece i make sure that i put in mylocations of my cross members. i'm going to have two of them. this is where i think theylook the best and you're also going to want to keepin mind functionality. you want to make sure thatthese aren't in a location where someone is going to bump their knee. i've done a little testing already and i'm pretty confident that where they are now

is exactly where i'm going to want them. as long as we've got this straight edge it's very easy to draw these. now i can cut my curve. the templates are done and i'm really happy with the way these turned out. i think the beefierlook is going to be much more appropriate for a table of this size. especially when you compare them to

the originals these now look like ... maybe i can use theseto make a similar desk that's half the size, half the length. maybe that would look okaywith this material but i think this is much moreappropriate for our table. our first prototype, itreally taught me a lot about what i was doing wrong with this piece and gave me a lot of perspective. the truth is, a second prototypecould be just as valuable.

i think this really setme on the right path but i think i could refinethings a little bit more if i had the time to builda second prototype. the problem is, as always,time. i just don't have enough time to build asecond prototype, analyze it, redo the templates and dothis whole process over again. i think these templates areclose enough at this point that i feel confident going intothis and making a project. perhaps this projectjust becomes version one

of this table and theni can make a subsequent improvement down the lineand build another one. it's just like the end table that i made. i got so much great feedbackfrom you guys about what i could do differentlythe next time i build one. if and when that timecomes i'm going to use that information to improveupon the design and make it even better, but thatdoesn't mean that the original wasn't goodenough to live in my house.

in this case this one, i think,at this point is ready to be built and to take theconcept and make it a reality. we're going to push forwardand hopefully we won't uncover any dramatic issues,i think we'll be okay. now i need to make theblanks for this project. the wood i'm going touse is honduran mahogany. this is a piece of eightquarter and i was really looking for 12 quarter for thisbecause ultimately when you're carving those parts and makingall these curves the more

glue lines you have the moregrain interruption there is, and it tends to be alittle bit of an eye sore. you have to be carefulif you glue up pieces to make them into nicethick chunks of wood. i looked for 12 quarter, couldn't find it, anywhere. nobody had 12 quarter so i was stuck with using eight quarter. this worked out for thebetter because ultimately two pieces of eight quarter isgoing to give me a thicker

piece of material thanone piece of 12 quarter. ultimately i think it's goingto work out in our favor but we do have to becareful of grain direction. it's important to try tocut your parts that you're going to glue together, cutthem out of the same board. if each of my pieces needsto be about 20 inches i'll take those two andput those together and try to get the end grainto match up really nice. hopefully in the end it will be a pretty

seamless connectionbetween the two pieces. these are big heavytimbers, obviously watch your back as you're movingthese pieces around. the sooner we get thesepieces cut down into smaller, more manageable pieces thebetter. let's get started. (bluesy rock music) i let the glue ups dryover night and at this point they're ready tobe milled once again. because that glue up isn'tabsolutely perfect we

need to remove some ofthe material to make sure everything is square, flaton both sides and we're at the final thicknessthat we really want here. i'm at about 3 5/8 and thetarget thickness is 3 1/2 inches. i've got plenty of room. an eighth is more thanenough to get this thing down to be perfectlyflat, square and parallel. the one thing i will cautionyou though is look at your joints and make sure thatany of that glue squeeze

out is scraped awaybecause that can cause you problems on your jointerand planer blades. one of these scrapertools is great for this. and i'm going to removea lot of wood so i'm not too worried about beingsuper careful here. (scratching) you can see when you put thetemplate up there that i do have quite a bit of extrastock here, which is good. it's better to have a little bit more

than not enough, that's for sure. let's head over to thejointer, get these guys milled up and probably use theplaner and drum sander as well to get these to theappropriate thickness. (mechanical humming) i've got my vertical parts of the legs, that's this part here, inthe clamps and i had to do a little bit of a glue upthere too because i couldn't get the right thicknessusing just a single board.

what i'm using are two piecesof six quarter together and i'm just going tolet that dry overnight. in the meantime i canstart tracing on the shapes for my other parts, the tops and bottoms, and start working on those. you'll notice i haven'tdone any cuts on the end grain because it's just not necessary. once i trace this oni'm going to cut around this curve and where it stops, it stops.

i don't need a perfectly square end. the same thing for the tophere. neither one of those edges have been cut, theyjust don't need to be. what is important is that the width is exactly what we want it to be. for instance this pieceis four inches wide, this piece is seven inches wide. the reason that needsto be nice and even is because number one, thebottom part is going

to be the thing thatrests against the floor. if that's not nice and straight that's going to create a problem. the top is where we havesome jointery going on, so if this isn't nice andstraight and also parallel to this line here we're goingto have problems there too. same thing goes forthe top template piece, only with four inches. all we have to do at this point is

line it up the feet here are flush. make sure i'm inside of my edges. get a nice sharp pencil, trace around. negotiating these curvescould be a little bit tricky. if you're just using aregular 14 inch bandsaw or even smaller it could be tough going. this is a lot of materialto have to cut through. what i've got is a nice,

relatively new blade,it's a wood slicer blade. it's about a quarter inch, it might even be a little bit less, it looks less to me. this will allow me to veryeasily navigate through any type of curve thati need to get through. certainly it's thinenough for this operation. you can probably getmost of this done with a blade that's evenapproaching a half inch and have no problem with these curves.

the key though is you want to make sure that your bandsaw is set up perfectly. if it's not square, if youtable is slightly off from the blade as you're cutting throughsomething that's this tall you may think you're trackingperfectly as you look from the top but once you get to theend and you finish that cut, if that blade was on anangle you'll cut into what we're going to refer toas the keeper material, the stuff we want to leave untouched.

that's not a good thing. if you think you mighthave some wobble going on or your think the blademight be a little bit out, stay a little further away from your line. then you can always sandback or cut again later to get a little bit closer.better safe than sorry. let's get ready to fire thisup. put on our protective gear. the key here:take yourtime, don't go too fast. if you go too fastyou'll stress the blade.

you can knock everything outof whack if you're pushing too hard. that's a lot ofto be cutting in one shot. let's get to it. (driving rock music) my first cutoff herei could just show you. pretty darn square right. if you can do that, if youcould check your cutoff and you notice that theblade is tracking straight up and down you couldbe more confident going

into your next cuts andget closer to the line. to get my pieces totheir final shape and get back to the line thati drew with my template i'm going to use myoscillating spindle sander. if you don't have one of these you can certainly use a routerand a flush trim bit, you just want to attach yourtemplate to the workpiece. i've done that a number oftimes on the show so i don't think there's any realreason to show you that,

but i will say that forthis project i really didn't see a need to do that necessarily. if there's any slight, andit would be very slight, variances after usingthe oscillating spindle sander it's really notgoing to be noticeable. i'm going to do so muchcarving and rounding over of these pieces and i'm notgoing to get too far from the shape of the templateso i don't really see, necessarily a need to deal with all that.

once i'm sanded back to my line i'm pretty confident that that'sas far as i need to go. i'm going to do some lastlittle bit of clean up here but remember, theseare still very rough. i've got to do a big roundover on them. i'm going to have toattach them to the vertical piece and start taperingsome things here and there so there's stillquite a bit of work to do. you don't really needthese to look perfect yet.

here's one of my verticalblanks, all glued and milled up. i've got it to the point now that it's about 2 5/8 of an inch thick. again, that's the result of putting two six quarter pieces together. you can see the way thetemplate goes on here, i've got it backwards, like that. what we're going to havehere are two cross members that are going to join intothis vertical piece so we

have to start thinkingabout locating that joinery. if we do it now while the piece is still square it's going to be much easier. the joinery that i'm going to use for this is going to be loose tenon joinery and i'm going to use the domino to do it. i usually try to showyou guys classic mortice and tenons whenever possiblebut i figured this was a good time to show youthe domino because it's

really one of the thingsthat the domino excels at, and that is jointing thingsthat are at different angles. you'll see when we get tothat point in the process it's going to simplifythings dramatically for us. in order to use it ineed accurate index lines that tell me where to plunge the bit into. on my template i'vedrawn the two locations where i would like those cross members to go and i want two dominos for each.

they would go in like so. what i need to do is transferthese lines to my blank. i've already transferred mylines to the end of my template so that i can see them when iflip it upside down like this. if everything looks good i can then put a little pencil mark here. that's going to give me the locations. now all i have to do isextend these down so that they're actually into themeat of the work piece.

since i want my crossmembers to be roughly in the middle of this boardi took my measurement from the template, setmy adjustable square. i just draw a line acrossand that gives me the dead center point where each oneof these guys is going to go. with out joinery marked out wecan now focus on cutting the 10 degree angles that we needon each end of this work piece. let's head over to the miter saw. i'm set here for a 10 degree cut.

just going to line up my laser with my pencil line and make my cut. (sawing) now i could just slide itover to the other side, moved my clamps so thati can secure it in place. line everything up. and we'll make the second cut. i don't want to get toomuch into a festool domino demonstration but essentiallyif you're trying to figure

out how this machine worksthink of a biscuit jointer. although it's fundamentally different in terms of the type ofjoint you get out of it, the concept of how themachine works and how you place your marks on a workpiece is very similar. i've got my cross hairshere. here's the problem. what would be really nice isif i could just reference off the front of the leg here andthen plunge straight down. the problem is my fence atits full height does not

allow my bit to get lowenough, i'm just a bit short. one of the great things aboutthe domino is that if you have the reference marks herelike we have this horizontal and a vertical referenceline you can actually just, without any support, dropthis in place and plunge down. that's exactly what i'm going to do, just making sure that everything is lined up with these lines. if they're not it's very easy to

tweak it out one way or the other. one thing that's going tohelp me is knowing that if the bottom of thedomino here is an inch from the surface i know i'mright where i need to be. i measured this earlier,lining it up by eye and then taking ameasurement on what i had. this will come in handy to double check me before i plunge down. then the only other thing is i've

got to worry about this center line. you can see the domino has a bunch of different reference lines here. this is the one that tellsme i'm in the middle. as long as i know that i'm aninch from the edge, like so, and once my center lineis marked and in place, right there, now i should be safe to plunge down and create my mortice. (drilling)

now with our mortices cut it'ssafe to cut the curves and do the final smoothing tofinalize the vertical pieces. i'm going to use thesame exact methods that i used to do the topand the bottom pieces. the curves on the verticalpiece are now nice and smooth and i can start tothink about the type of jointery i want to usefor the connection of the vertical piece to the topand the bottom pieces. once again i think the domino is going to

be the quickest, simplest way to do this. all i really need are my index marks here on both the vertical piece and my foot. once i have those in placeit's just a matter of once again plunging downto create the mortices. one thing i do want to talkabout is these dominos. if you look at the dominoon the surface here that may not looksubstantial enough for this joint but what you haveto remember is we're going

to be removing a lot ofstock from these pieces. when it's all said anddone these legs are going to be a lot more slenderthan they look right now, so there won't be nearlyas much material there. if you have too manyjoints, too many mortice and tenon joints or it'sjust simply too large you could wind up cutting into it later, and we want to make surethat we don't do that. two should be plenty for this

joint once it's all thinned out. i've got my marks here, i'mgoing to make my cuts and incidentally the process isgoing to be the same for both of the bottom joints and ofcourse both of the top joints. the top piece is very similarin shape to the bottom piece. they're all the way over therebut you get my point here. for the most part we're justjoining these two together. the reason why i thinkthe domino is a really good choice for this iswe have an angle here,

there's a 10 degreeangle cut on that piece. if you were actually makingintegral mortice and tenon there you might have a littlebit of a challenge deciding whether this tenon should beangled with that 10 degrees, should it be perpendicularto the 10 degrees. it can get really tricky. maybe someday in the futurewe'll cover construction techniques to do somethinglike that with a traditional mortice and tenon but thedomino just makes it so much

faster for me and i need to getmoving onto the next project, so it's just the quickest solution. let's see how we did. if everything lines upperfectly we're good to go. oh yeah, that's what we're looking for. just going to do a quickdry assembly to make sure all the joints came outthe way i hope they did. (sleepy jazz music) (woman singing)

voiceover:next time on the wood whisperer (street carnival music) marc:i'm going to switch tomy cabinet maker's rasp and just start to try to cleanthings up a little bit more. where this point meets hereis a whole bunch of end grain which is what i'mspreading the glue on now. i've got two honduranmahogany boards here. the biggest one is a full 14 inches. want to take your woodworkingto the next level?

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