I decided the table saw isn't going to work for the spandrel mitres. Blade run-out will eat a 0.75-degree angle, and free-handing the truing across four spandrels would guarantee they don't match. The exact number - 45.75/44.25 or 45.74/44.26 - matters less than all four being identical.
So I built a (long overdue) edge-grain shooting board and used it to make a nigh perfect 153:2 wedge. The wedge rides on the mitre shooting board and gives each spandrel the same nudge past 45. Because the same wedge works for both angles — uphill is one, downhill is the other — all eight faces will match. The shooting board also meant I could plane the spandrels to final length and width with a precision power tools can't touch. Hand tools are often slower; they're rarely less precise.
I cut the female dovetail slots in the spandrels before it occurred to me that the legs need to be fully finished - shaped, planed, sanded, carved - before fitting the male dovetail. Even a pass of 320 grit will take a perfect fit and make it sloppy. So I finished the legs and managed to get one fitted to its spandrel before Daddy Duties commenced. Figuring out the order of operations of this build has been tough. All the knowledge that was once passed orally is gone, so now all we can do is try and reverse engineer it (from a photograph... yikes) and hope that we don’t build ourselves into a corner.
Figuring out the order of operations of this build has been tough. All the knowledge that was once passed orally is gone, so now all we can do is try and reverse engineer it (from a photograph... yikes) and hope that we don’t build ourselves into a corner.
Tomorrow: fit all the legs, apron bridles and maybe some more shaping. Then onto a single dovetail in each corner, and then... pretty much done. The last 20% and all that.