Vineyard Table Part 5

O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should, with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts! 

 ~William Shakespeare, Othello

 I decided to drawbore the legs into the feet.  I will touch briefly on drawboring; magazines recently have gotten a lot of mileage out of this technique so there is plenty of info out there.  Essentially, you cut a mortise and tenon and then drill a hole thru the mortise (not the tenon) and then mark the exact center of the hole onto the tenon.

Then you offset the hole 1/16" or so towards the shoulder of the tenon.  Below you can see how I have drilled the holes, note how the inner hole, the hole thru the tenon, is offset to the shoulder.

Then you ream the hole with a drawbore pin to allow the dowel to more easily start.  I made this pin from a drift pin set into an octagonal ash handle. You can now buy there at Lie Nielsen, among others. 

Then I sharpen the end of the dowel in a pencil sharpener and drive it thru.  Above you can see the tension that pushes the dowel up, even after it is seated.  Old post and beam barns were constructed using this technique; now they just build ugly steel huts.  That sadly is a time gone that we will never see again.

 Above you can see the mortise has been chopped out and below is the tenon, with the wedge slots cut to receive the wedges.  I cut the slots wide to have wide wedges so they would be noticeable from casually looking at the table.  I think that says "handmade".

Here are the wedges driven in and cut flush.  You can see the walnut wedges that should be a nice contrast to the white oak.

Here is the table ready for the fume tent.  I cleaned up the garage and left a window open.  I'll go into the fuming next post but suffice it to say I used much stronger ammonia and significantly cut down the fume time.  And it looks amazing.  I'll post the pics as soon as I get them back from Connie.