We finally had an afternoon sunny enough to take pictures of the new table, so we carted it to the old rail yard. I'm not sure if this is trespassing, but its my new favorite place to shoot furniture.
It was a huge relief to see this piece come together. Making it successfully meant getting the hang of the the tapered-tenon construction used in Windsor chairs - basically the top of the leg is shaped to match a tapering hole in the top, then locked in place with a wedge. This required a new tool - a reamer.
With a description written by the great chair-maker John Alexander, this was fairly straightforward to make. Basically, the tool is a wooden shaft with a cone turned at one end with a pitch identical to tapered ends of the legs you turn. A blade fitted to a slot in the cone scrapes a matching hole as you slooooowly twist, clear shavings, and twist some more. The body is ash, and the blade is filed from the crooked end of a saw I found in our garage when we moved in. It took a few hours of tweaking and testing to get the thing working right but it eventually did. There is a particular thrill in getting such fine, precise results from such a dead-nuts simple tool.
