Been a while since I did an update, but the work continues as I find the time.

One thing I put off for a while was cutting the locking wedges for my rails. Mostly because I have never done this style of jointery before, and you really only get one chance at each rail to mess it up. But I figured if things went bad enough, I could always cut the tenons flush and permanently dowell them into place.

First, I needed to cut some wedges. There was some internet debate as to the optimal angle for a wedge to lock in and pull tension without slipping out easily. I saw folks who swore anything more than 5 degrees wouldn't hold, and others that said you could go as wide as 15 degrees and be fine. I settled on about 7 degrees.

Cut a 7 degree angle in the end of a piece of scrap on my compound miter, and then clamped it as a guide for the narrow wedges, which I cut on my table saw sled:


With the wedges cut, I ball-parked where I'd want them to be when driven in place. Then marked off the wedge width with my marking gauge and traced out all the cut lines.



I chose my wedge width based on whichever of the three mortise chisels I own was closest to 1/3 the width of my tenon. Then I clamped it up with plenty of support on either side of the tenon to keep me from blowing it out. Finally, cut another little piece of scrap with a 7 degree angle to serve as a guide. Started on the bottom end, working towards the middle of the tenon.




You'll notice that my back wall is a little further back than my line. The way this joint works is to pull tension from the top and bottom of the wedge. If I was right at the line, there would be no way to pull more tension into the joint.



Test wedge, which is half the thickness of the actual wedge, fit exactly where I wanted it. Then I could trim the real wedges to the exact width of the mortise with my #4 plane.