Woodworking 101: The top-secret project..... #4: The Parts Department

Ok, the cat is fighting to get out of the bag, because after this post, everyone should know what we’re building. So I guess our top secret project will be only a bottom secret project, or no secret at all. Anyway, although it’s been rough the last few weeks for me, I’ve gotten some work done in the parts department. While this project has a very well thought out design, some of the parts are headscratchers. I am learning a few new techniques on this project.
So here we go.

After some glueup and cutting, here are the upper and lower wheelblocks.

This next part was made on a day that I was hurting so bad I really didn’t have any business in the shop. That’s never stopped me before though. It took all day to make. The 11.5 cm piece for the bottom has a lip on it. I cut that piece four times before I got it good enough that I was happy with it. I thought I was happy anyway. Then I went home for the evening. I woke up in the middle of the night and walked over to the shop and set the upper wheelblock frame on the body frame. Something was bothering me, and the view you see above proved my suspisions. Something was off on the measurements.
So I brought the piece back home with me, along with a tape measure, to figure out how in the world, with all me checking and re-checking, did I mess it up.
It came down to this. There are notches that are 1.5 cm wide and 2.5 cm deep cut into the 3.2 cm sides where the top and bottom meet it. The sides are 3.2 cm deep and 4 cm wide. The plans did not give you the measurement for the cutout, only that it was 1.5 cm deep. So I had to subtract 1.5 cm from the width. Well, somehow I got confused and subtracted it from 3.2 instead of 4 cm and came up with 0.7 cm. This threw everything off.
Does that make sense? I threw all those numbers out there to show how easily it was to get confused with it. Since making this mistake, I have came up with a method on these types of parts on this project. Before making a cut now, I draw it out with an ink pen on the wood. to make sure I don’t get confused.
However, that didn’t help with this part. I thought about trying to cut it apart and redo. Since this will have plenty of tension on it though, I felt it was best to just throw these in the firewood pile and start over on them.

While the glue up was drying on the new upper wheelblock frames, I cut the L-brackets that they’ll slide into.

Dinasours roamed the earth the last time I done a spline joint, so I had no way of cutting them. I once had a fancy jig I’d built for a saw that has long since left my shop, but it is as gone as the saw. So I glued up a quick and dirty jig to cut the splines in the upper wheelblock frames. It worked well enough that I saved this jig. It isn’t as fancy as the one I used to have, but it got the job done.
As for the splines, their drying at this very moment for me to trim up tomorrow. The plans call for splines on these joints for strength.
Splines.
What can I say about the splines?
It’s been a long time and my memory isn’t that great. I don’t know if I done something wrong or if splines are just simply the messiest one techniques a woodworker could ever have to do.
The splines are an alternate method in the plans. The ideal way to make the frames is finger joints. I have no way of making finger joints that thin or deep though. So I went with this method.

Remember we’re building two of these. So here are the two trunnion support beams. In the front is the front top side of one of them. In the rear is the back bottom side of the other. I snapped this photo to show the cutout areas in it.
The front has a cutout for the blade guide that I cutout by setting the depth on the table saw and running it back and forth across the blade. Then I finished up the angle of the cut on my band saw.
The top leading edge has a forty five degree piece ripped off to allow the tilting of the table without interference.

After that cut was made, then I had a blade’s width relief area that had to be trimmed off of each end. I just stood the piece up on it’s angled side and set up my miter gauge to trim this off of each end. This is to provide clearance for the trunnions.

On the back side, there is an area that has to go to make clearance for the bottom wheel. The plans give two different ways to accomplish this. You can hog it out with hand tools, or you can set up and make stopped cuts on the table saw. Since I consider myself the power tool guy (I don’t do hand tools unless I have to), you can see which method I chose.
I just set it up to make the cut to the depth I needed with my miter gauge. Then I clamped a bar clamp to my saw table to prevent the miter gauge from going any further than that. Then I kept running the piece over the blade continuously while holding it against the miter gauge until I had everything cut out that I needed.
Sooooo, that’s where we’re at now. Since I’m sure everyone knows what we’re building now, I’ll go ahead and tell you with my parting photos.
Here, arriving in the mail today, is my Woodslicer blade from Highland Woodworking: