This weekend I hoped to get the player stations cut and fit and just waiting for finish. Let’s see how close I got!

First up I drilled out the bottoms of the verticals to accept threaded inserts, using the same jig:

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Next up would be cutting the stopped rabbets in the horizontal pieces. Why is it called a “stopped” rabbet? Because the cut doesn’t go all the way from end to end, it stops before getting there, keeping the corner and increasing stability a bit. It’ll be more clear when you see the finished product.

First up was laying out where the rabbets would go using a marking gauge:

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I could have sawed the corners and dug out all of the waste with a chisel, but I used a forstner bit instead:

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Then, I made a jig that would allow me to chisel out the waste at exactly 90°, clamping the board in place and simply holding the chisel against the two fences:

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After a couple of hours those were looking great:

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Next was notching out the corners of the verticals to fit inside the stopped rabbet. I marked the depth with the marking gauge and then transferred the edges of the rabbet to those boards cutting the notch on the table saw:

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And they fit great! I made them just a hair proud (meaning the vertical stuck out slightly farther than the edge of the horizontal) so that I could sand them flush after everything was glued together.

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If you’ll remember, I changed the design from the original dovetails to pins, so I cut the three of those on the verticals:

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Finally, after blue-taping the vertical pieces in place, I could test how they fit and rotated on the actual table:

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After opening the station, I found that something was amiss. I knew that this particular fitment was going to be crucial, and after getting everything in place I found it less than ideal: the tray, in the open position, was 1/16” - 3/32” higher than the base of the table:

More on that in my next post, and how I plan to fix it.

You might think this isn’t a huge deal: just sand the edge a tad and no one will notice. But they will as soon as they open the drawer in front of them, and it stops only halfway open because it runs into that edge. Of if you try to write, or place a miniature along that seam, or roll some dice…I think it’s going to be a source of enough problems that it needs to be fixed before going any further in the build.

So how did this happen? Well, until I cut the joinery for real, it was tough to approximate where things were going to go by just holding pieces up and measuring. 1/32” of an inch off when closed and another 1/32” when open leads to the 1/16”+ plus offset I’m getting.

After thinking about the problem, I came up with four potential fixes:

1. Add a shim inside the rabbet to essentially make the player station taller (when closed) which has the side effect of making it deeper when open. I would have to plane the whole piece down by the thickness of the shim so that the top of table (when the player station is closed) remain coplaner with the cupholders, corners etc.:

The big con here is that the shims would be fairly obvious when the tray was open and looking from the side, and when closed the horizontal would be thinner than the top of the cupholders and corners.

1. Add a shim on the angle, achieving the same effect as above (raising the top):

Again, fairly obvious that it was patched and would again lead to the top being thinner. Also I’d have to fill the mortise for the hinge and then re-cut it.

1. Keep the rabbets as they are, keep the top where it is, but thin out the underside of the board (which becomes the play surface when open) by 1/16” - 3/32”:

This could be done fairly easy with a router. When the station is open it would look relatively good, but when closed you’d see a notch taken out along the top edge. Gross.

And finally, the nuclear option:

1. Remake the verticals.

And this is the one I’m going to go with, as it’s the only option that won’t bug me forever afterwords every time I see the table. The extra work will suck now, but not as much as the lifelong heartbreak after if I don’t.

In retrospect there was a relatively easy to way to test the verticals to see what the alignment would have been: simply open them up and see where the bases align:

And there’s the 1/16” - 3/32” difference:

Those two bottom edges should be aligned like this:

In all fairness to myself, I hadn’t figured out how deep/wide that rabbet would be yet, so when I was building the verticals that notch wasn’t there, which is required for this visual reference to work. But now that I have the rabbets figured out I can cut those notches early and I’ll have an easy way to check that my test pieces are going to line up. Easy!

Or is it? The vertical is basically exactly as tall as it needs to be to align with the tops of the cupholders and corners. And I don’t want to change the thickness of the horizontals, as discussed above, or they won’t line up the top of everything else. What variables are left to change?

The angle.

By making the angle slightly steeper, I can make the top deeper when open, but it won’t change the height at all when closed:

It’s exagerrated here, but by going from 18.5° to 19° I think it’ll give me the height difference I need. I’m going to make a couple of test pieces to confirm, but I believe that’s the magic number.

Unfortunately I don’t have enough wood left over to make these again, so I’ll need to run to Saroyan and pick up a board. Maybe this is actually a blessing in disguise because the board I used to make them the first time wasn’t from my initial batch of the nice ribbon-grained stuff, it was something leftover from another project, and may not have matched the aesthetic of the rest of the table. Having some ribbon grain will go better with the overall look.

They say the only difference between a master woodworker and a novice is that the master is better at hiding their mistakes. I’d like to think that even though I made an ugly mistake, I’ll be fixing it so no one ever knows, and so this is actually another step on the journey towards woodworking enlightenment!

Picked up a board on Monday for rebuilding the split verticals, with some amazing ribbon grain. I cut it down into manageable chunks (12” long, to safely go through the planer) and each one will be cut in half to make two verticals:

I’ve been rebuilding the verticals in one to two-hour chunks at night after dinner. They should be complete tonight:

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I strapped a camera to my head and documented how one of these hinged supports for the player stations is built! Apologies for some of the drilling being blocked, I couldn’t really tell where the camera was pointed!