Beech Pulpit #2

It is nice to start making some progress on the pulpit. 

Its easy for me to get sidetracked and lose interest in a project, especially when I am unsure about how to do a certain procedure.  There are many ways to accomplish a woodworking project, probably as may different ways as there are woodworkers.  I guess my big slow down was that I was unsure how I wanted to go about making the arches and the corner details.  I like to have a picture in my mind before I start but, sometimes coming up with that picture is difficult.  I knew what I wanted the panels to look like when finished but I didn't have a plan on how I was going to reach that destination.  I had a direction to go, I just needed to get going!  Well I figured out how to get the details done, with decent results, at least one that I am satisfied with and now I am getting ready to join the panels to make the body of the pulpit.

Here are the panels with the arches, corner arches and trim.  I still have some cleanup work to do on the corner arches but that will be towards the end before the final assembly.  If you click on the pictures you will get a large picture that shows a lot more of the details and you will see what I mean about cleaning the corners up. 

Here are the arches and corners removed and labelled for each panel that they came from.

This is the stack of panels after the details are removed and ready to get marked and cut for joining.

The pulpit is 5 sided and forms a half circle, sort of.  I will be cutting each edge that will be joined with a 22.5 degree cut so when two edges are joined, one from each panel, it will make a 45 degree angle measured on the inside of the two panels where they meet.

Here they are all marked up so I don't make a mistake and cut them on the wrong side, or the angle going the opposite direction.

Here is one edge after running through the table saw.  I used a thin kerf combination blade to make these initial cut to remove most of the waste.  I will install my Freud Glue Line rip blade and make the final cuts to width for a smooooooth surface to glue them together. 

These will be a long grain to long grain glue joint and I am thinking that it should be plenty strong enough for this situation.  I have thought about splining the joint but I should be doing good with this.  If any of you have any other thought, just leave a comment, and we can discuss it. 

Here are all of the panels rough cut to width.  Next is the get them to final width with a clean edge and then start to figure out a dry assembly to get ready to use real glue!

Next is final width and joining them!