At this point, I had finally figured out how I thought I would handle the bent splines, so it was time to assemble the carcasses. I got the jig ready, got out pretty much every single clamp I owned, ran rehearsal several times to make sure I had the process down, and then started gluing everything together.
Half an hour later, I was ready to throw the entire project in the trash.
That's what the shop looks like after you've messed up your math again, and have to get everything out of the clamps but the glue's already started curing and it's so damn stupid and frustrating that you have to throw one of the pieces across the garage and just call it a night because everything sucks. Yes, I threw my hat on the floor and yes, I probably said a few bad words.
And all because my lousy math skills burnt me yet again. When working out the final length of the shelves, I had only subtracted the depth of ONE dado, instead of both. The damn shelves were three-eighths of an inch too long, and the carcass wouldn't square up or stay tight at the miter joint.
So I gave it a couple of days and then came back to pick up the pieces. I made a few repairs where I could (though the back edge of one of the side pieces has a flaw that I will always, always know is there) and cut the shelves down to their proper length.
The second attempt at the glue up went much more smoothly, and I managed to finally assemble the carcasses.
And then it was time for some splines!
I did the splines in the miter joint first (because they were fun and easy and I kinda needed a quick win after that horrible glue-up), and then moved on to the bent ones. I had originally planned to use a circular saw to make a slice across the kerf cuts on the inside of the curve (while the board was still flat) so that the splines would be hidden and only visible on the inside. But, keeping the saw straight was going to be really tough, given the length of the cut, and the splines were going to be a very weird shape as well. I was also a little worried about sanding through the veneer on the inside curves when trying to get the splines properly flush.
Given that I already had visible splines in the miter, I figured that having visible splines on the bend would be kind of a neat detail. So I spent a fair amount of time trying to work out how to raise the blade on the table saw through the material in a consistent, repeatable way that didn't also result in weird ass-looking splines. In the end, I beefed up my crosscut sled with some aftermarket parts and went with a simple straight pass over the blade.
It looked scary and it was scary.
This let me use essentially a straight piece of sapele as the spline. I just traced out the pattern for each spline, cut it out on the band saw, and then sanded them down to fit each slot individually before gluing them in place.
As you can see, they're pretty big splines, but that's good. They bisect all of the kerfs, and provide lots of stability and - more importantly - gluing surface area.
It was about this time that I started my experiments with steam bending. I was still hoping to be able to bend the edge banding around that curve, but was also still thinking about how I would handle it if the bending didn't work out. (I think I kinda knew, you know?)
Anyway, I spent the next month futzing about with the steam cannon before coming to the somewhat foreseeable conclusion that I wasn't going to be able to bend the edge banding. I had to work out a way to get edge banding on those corners and to absolutely no one's surprise, my solution involved splines!
I somehow failed to take any pictures of this, but anyway: I planed down my very last sapele plank to size, and traced the shape of the corner onto it four times. I laid it out so the grain was running diagonally across the corner (man, pictures would help here, eh?) and then cut out the pieces on the bandsaw. I sanded them down close to final size, trimmed them to length, and then cut a notch in each end - and a matching notch in several other pieces of edge banding.
It was about this time that my dad showed up for his annual visit where he goes to see his doctor and his doctor tells him to go away and come back next year. It was good timing as I got to take a week off work and he got to help me out with the edge banding.
Here's why I cut the notches in the corner pieces and the edge banding, by the way:
WAY easier than a scarf joint, much stronger, and a nice little detail besides. Now all we had to do was repeat it several times over the course of two days:
Once all the edge banding was glued up and dry, it was time to trim it flush.
This was all going really well until I made a somewhat overly aggressive cut while going around one of the bends and tore out a great jeezly chunk of wood. On the front, outside edge. Of course.
Not gonna lie. This was another one of those "Well, there goes THAT project!" moments. I couldn't think of a way to fill that nasty scar with anything that wasn't going to stick out like a sore thumb. I toyed with the idea of making it as obvious as possible, and going for some kind of distressed, rustic approach to the whole thing, but that just wasn't going to play with the design at all.
Instead, I stepped away for a couple of days (okay, I did some more sanding while I thought about it), and then emailed my old woodworking instructor for advice. Much to my surprise, he responded almost the same day with a few incredibly helpful suggestions, and a few tips on the methods he'd use to fix it.
Working with his advice, I came up with a way to repair the damage and the key to the fix turned out to be how I'd so "thoughtfully" oriented the grain on an angle across the curve (ironically, it was this same orientation that caused the tear out in the first place). I started by scoring a line along the grain, right across the corner, and then chiseled away all of the material on the outside of that line.
Then I took a piece from the same board (not just the same board, actually, but the piece I cut off the board immediately beside the piece I was fixing), got a nice clean edge on it at the table saw, and glued and clamped it into the gap.
Once the glue had properly cured, I carefully trimmed it flush again, and it looked - even if I say so myself - perfect:
Then all I had to do was cut the rabbet in the edge banding on the back sides, square up the corners with a chisel, cut and sand the backs, add splines to the mitered corners of the edge banding, and then sand, sand, sand, and sand.
Then it was time for finishing!
Which I will tell you all about in Part 3.
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