Caution, Low Flying Jatoba (JFL Part 5)

The structural part of the lamp is done to a point where I can get measurements for the inner pieces.  So it's time to move on to the part that makes the lamp interesting.  The detail work that covers the paper screens.

I start by cutting the four vertical rails to length.

And cutting the eight horizontal rails to length.

I'm going to half lap the verticals into the horizontals and each side is going to have the vertical rail offset to the left.  This means that the dado for the top and bottom horizontal rails needs to be cut differently.  To make sure I don't get confused I make a chalk line on each board where I'm going to cut the dado.  (Yes I'm easily confused.)

Here's the dado being cut into one of the top pieces.  There's lots of wood for me to hold onto the piece to the left of the blade here.

These dados don't go all the way through the rails.  The pencil line on the sacrificial fence is where I'm going to stop all of the cuts to make them consistent.

When cutting the bottom horizontals there's not a lot of wood left of the blade to safely hold on to.  So I adjust my setup.  With the Grr-Ripper and another board laying flat against the mitre gauge I can safely put these boards through the saw.

Here are all of the rails with the dados cut in them.

Now I've marked the parts of the vertical rails that are going to be notched out.  Again I didn't want to take any chances and cut the notches on the wrong sides.

Here's the setup I used.  The backing piece of jatoba on the mitre gauge is my test cut.  It's now going to be used to prevent the back of the rails from chipping out when they're being cut.

Here's a rail ready to be cut.

This inch and a half long piece of jatoba came flying of the tablesaw during one of the cuts.  It hit my safety glasses hard enough that I could hear it over the noise of the running saw, even with ear protection on.  I'm sure glad I didn't decide to, "just this one time" not put on my safety glasses.  I saw it coming too, but all I had time to do was blink as the jatoba missile  accurately honed in on my right eye.

The ends are all notched with no casualties.

I used a plane to clean up the burn marks on the rails.

Here I've used a plane to clean up the burn marks on one of the legs.

Now the pile of shavings indicates I've used the plane to clean up all of the legs.

What better place to store five foot long leg pieces than vertically?  Plus it's motivational to have the lamp partly assembled.

Now I'm cutting the notches out of the middle of the vertical rails.  These will hold smaller cross rail detail pieces.

I've upgraded my mitre guage.  I can make these cuts without risk of the wood bending by using the stop on the new mitre gauge instead of the fence.  The fence is a long ways away and would probably have deformed the rail if I ran the end along it.

Then all I need to do is flip the rail around and cut the second notch.

It takes a long time to sand jatoba and to make sure I do a good job and don't miss any sides I make a pencil mark on each face of the legs.  When the pencil mark is gone I switch down to a finer grade of sand paper.  To make sure I don't lose track of my pencil mark I align it with another mark I've made on the work bench.

I've lined up all of the horizontal rail pieces here and colour matched them.

Then I labeled each piece inside the dado so I can keep them properly paired up.

Here's a test fit of one of the sides to wrap up this post.

-G!