With the main carcass construction complete, it's time to move onto the legs. Before I can size the legs, I need to put the bevel. For this, I just used my hand planes. I started with the cross grain bevel and then moved onto with the grain. Doing crossed gain first allows a chance to fix any tear out when working with the grain. It went quickly with now issues to report.
As for the legs, I had some pieces of figured maple that were the perfect size. I picked out the parts with the best figure and cut to over length. The one thing I'm not certain of is how high I want the legs to keep the bottom of the box off the surface. After some mock ups and my wife's input (that happy wife happy life thing), we settled on either 1" or 3/4" (can't recall). With the decided then it was a matter of cutting the legs to width. I did a dry assembly and then measured how much flat spot I had underneath the bevel. I had a target number in mind on width when I designed it; it is always good to double check to make sure something isn't way off after assembly. Then I cut the legs to width.
As for the curve on the legs, I spent a fair bit of time looking at the legs I had made on the nightstand. Different size so I need to account for scale down on the breadbox. One of the carryover of being a bench chemist for a large part of my life is a lab notebook. I am used to write detailed notes when I made things in the lab so I or others could duplicate the results. Keeping a good lab notebook is a well ingrained habit and it carries over to woodworking. For making the legs, I looked up how I did the layout for the nightstand. What I did there was measured midpoint and end point of where I wanted the curve and used something flexible. As such, I figured out what I wanted my midpoint and endpoint to be on the legs then used a mixture of freehand and French curve to get the flow I wanted. After the first leg is done, it then serves as a template for the other three. Depending on the leg, I used either a coping saw or stop cuts and a chisel to remove the bulk of the wood. Then spoke shave, card scarper and sand paper to finish. They came out good.
Glue up was next and pretty straight forward. Carcass first then the legs. For the legs, I wanted to center the legs over dovetails (part of the design). I think I went very slightly off center to cover up a hole in one side of the cherry. To help keep the legs in place when drying I used some blind pin nails.
From here, it was time to make the panels and install them and finish the project. That will be for the next blog post.
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