new organ: part 2

Last updated on Mar 14, 2022

A lot happened last week!

I'm going to string this out over several posts to avoid overwhelming you!

When last I left you, I had just purchased some beautiful ash lumber from a tree in Minneapolis:

Now, here's where the fun began! Check out my bench in the picture below. It's made from walnut. Obviously, my organ console will be a contrasting color of wood. However, I do want the shape to be as consistent as possible. Because of this, I designed my organ console to have those beautiful 45-degree angled legs.

Those legs were very tricky to replicate. I started with the boards, all 100 inches long and 10 inches wide:

I cut them down to the right length and width:

Then I cut them all to 45-degree angles:

Now, the bench has four legs. Since my organ console is a lot bigger (though it actually has to support less weight than the bench), I gave it eight legs. That means I had to cut and glue a total of sixteen perfect 45-degree joints. That took me all day, but the results were great!

I used an awesome little tool that makes perfect mortises for floating tenons. In normal English, that just means it makes holes in the ends of boards so you can stick them together with a little block of wood. This type of joint is really, really strong. Here's a picture:

From https://thewoodwhispererguild.com/images/7126/

I didn't get any pictures of my joints, but here's the tool I used to make them:

And here are (half of) the finished legs!

And here're the other halves of the legs. Notice how they're different lengths? That's on purpose! You'll see why later!

But in the meantime, take a moment to appreciate how many clamps it took to get these legs perfectly sandwiched together. Note especially that clamping these was a process in space and time. I had to put the clamps on in a specific order to make sure everything worked right.