Doorbell Cover #2 - Cutting Wood

This is a pretty small project so it went together very quickly.  I dug through the wood pile and found a nice looking piece of quarter-sawn white oak.  A bit of milling on the jointer, planer, tablesaw and mitre saw and I had the basic parts.

One of the reasons I picked this easy project is that I wanted to finally try using my mortiser on a real project.  I had picked up the used Powermatic 719A mortiser a long time ago and had yet to use it on a real project.  My lovely assistant Lauren helped me cut mortises in the rails to receive the stiles.  It went pretty well, though on the first cut I thought something was wrong as I had to pull way to hard on the lever.  Turns out I'd left the depth stop tightened too low.  Oops.  After that it was just a matter of remember which handle to turn to shift the piece sideways before making the next cut.



I ran the stiles through the tablesaw with a mitre gauge to cut the tenons.  I just used the combination blade on the saw.  In retrospect I should have done a few things differently :

1. Moved the fence back before the blade to avoid potential kickback
2. Use a dado blade or the delta tenoning jig to get smoother tenons.

I had to clean up the messy tenons with some chisel work.  Next time I'll use the tenoning jig that I bought a long time ago and haven't used yet (there's a theme here).

 

After cleaning up the tenons, everything did fit together well.  Here's me testing the fit of the first joint.



I glued up the rail and stiles, and while that was drying I cut the side pieces.  I could have used mortise and tenons to join these, but just went with a simple butt joint using pocket screws instead.  No one will see this joint and it's quick and easy to make.



I clamped the cover together and then drove in the pocket hole screws.  Once that was done, I added the back sides, just glued and clamped, no screws necessary for this joint.



And every last, the top and bottom pieces.