The very young mechanic, so far as my experience of him goes (and it is rather extensive), makes his early attempt by sticking the points of four nails into the corners of any tolerably square piece of board he can lay hands on. His next attempt, when he has risen to the dignity of a knife and gimlet, is to place four wooden legs at the corners of a similar board, which, if the said legs are glued in (by which a wonderful mess is always made of the structure), is considered a great feat, and worthy of the admiring patronage of fond parents and playmates. Now, a table does not consist of any such arrangement of pieces, although I certainly have seen sometimes, in the cottages of the poor, a three-legged affair of this nature, which is just nothing more than a magnified milking-stool. We cannot content ourselves now with anything of the kind. We shall have to work away with plane and chisel and square, and with neat tenon and mortice joints first construct the frame upon which the top will be placed, and then finish it secundum artem, the English of which, as I am writing to boys, I shall not reveal.
The table shall be 3 feet long, 1 foot 8 inches wide, 2 feet 4 inches high; the top board being half an inch thick when planed and fitted, for which it will therefore be required to be three-quarters of an inch in the rough. The legs demand attention first. Plane up strips cut from a 2-inch board, and let them be exactly 2 inches wide. These must be worked up with the greatest possible accuracy, or it will be impossible to fit the framework so as to make the table stand truly or bear inspection. After four such strips have been planed up, cut a piece from a half-inch board, or from a board that will plane to half an inch. Let this be 4 inches wide and 9 feet long, and be sure to plane this also truly, and to make the edges square to the sides.
Fig. 23.
If you have no strip that will answer of 9 feet long, you can cut two or more instead, remembering that you will require two pieces each 18 inches long and two of 2 feet 9 at the least, all as nearly alike in width as possible. You have now all that you will need for the framework of your table—the top may be left till the rest is fitted. Now you may proceed to cut the requisite mortices in the legs, which you will understand by sketch Fig. 23, which represents one corner of the table before the top is added. There is no more difficulty in this than in the previous work, except perhaps that somewhat more care is requisite in squaring up the several pieces and cutting the mortices with accuracy. Use the gauge as before in marking the mortices, trying it until it is so fixed that it will leave the proper width of the holes, namely, half an inch (which is the thickness of the strips which are to form the framework). This is upon the supposition that your gauge has but one marking point: but to explain its use.
Fig. 24.
I shall now introduce to your notice a regular mortice-gauge of two points, which is vastly more convenient. This is represented in Fig. 24. The main stem is grooved along its length on one side with a dovetailed slit, that is, a groove which is wider below than above. This is generally made in a brass plate attached to the stem of the gauge, but sometimes in the wood itself. In this slides a slip of brass which can be drawn back by pulling the knob A, or by turning a thumbscrew at one end, as in the more expensive gauges. One of the marking points is fixed in the end of this slide, the other in the wood (or metal) beyond it, at B, and when these are allowed to be together they form but one point, being flattened on one side, so that they will fit accurately against each other. Thus it is easy to separate the two points at pleasure to the exact width of the required mortice. By means of the wedged sliding piece C, we now have merely to determine how far the edge of the mortice is to be from one side of the piece. Thus, suppose that in the present case we should prefer to have the side of the frame nearer to the outside edge of the legs than to the inside, we can so arrange it easily; but we must then take care to gauge all alike, either from the inside edge or the outside. We do not, therefore, with this kind of gauge work from both edges, and leave the space between the lines for the width of the mortice, but we work from one edge only of the piece of wood, and mark the mortice at once in any desired position. I need hardly repeat, that for any particular job, a very good substitute for such gauge can be made by driving two small nails into a strip of wood cut with a projecting piece to serve instead of the movable head.
Fig. 25.