Work got pretty busy, so I ended up putting this one to the side for a few weeks. Decided to knock out something I thought would take 15 minutes, that ended up taking two hours as a result of me not paying good attention.

I decided the legs would be more rigid and look a little better with cross braces, but I didn't want to compromise the legs by bashing another set of mortises in them, so I decided to use my Festool Domino and carve a couple of quick mortises for floating tenons.


The mortises went in really quick. 10 minutes tops. Then I went to assemble everything, and not one of them lined up with the other. I was moving so fast I didn't verify that the height adjustment was locked all the way down on the Domino, and it drifted with every mortise. The ones with the most drift had up to 4mm of difference between them, and no two mortises varied by the same amounts.


I recut the brace pieces, then measured where each hole needed to be with a caliper, and marked it on the piece.


Then I dialed in the fine adjustment to the Domino fence with a feeler gauge, to within about 5 hundredths of an inch. I had to do this eight times, all because I tried to do something quick instead of making sure I did it right.


But I got close enough eventually.




Another opportunity to dry-fit everything and see where I am at:





The part that comes next is the most tedious part for me, which is all the adjusting and fitting before I can glue it up and move on to sand and stain. It's probably only a couple of hours of work, but I just don't like doing it, so I tend to put it off. But hoping I can find the motivation to put some work into it over the 4th of July.