Author: Lost Art Press

When you start working in the world of furniture that folds and unfolds, it’s easy to get your frontal lobe into a blender. Even though you know that this contraption should work, you don’t actually believe it until you build it.

With this folding officer’s desk, I had six butt hinges all turning in different directions. So keeping inside and outside all straight as I screwed them in kept me flummoxed. And I kept wondering how much spacing I should leave between the folding aprons and the inside of the legs (my experiments with the mechanism told me the answer was “none”).

But still you worry.

So it was satisfying for the table base to snap open and shut perfectly on the first try.

Now I just need to build the folding desktop, which locks the base in the open position. I’d better get the jack plane sharpened up – the top is 24” wide, and I have only a 13” surface planer.

— Christopher Schwarz

You don’t see bareface tenons discussed much, but they can sometimes be the right joint when you need some extra strength.

For those of you new to joinery, a bareface tenon is a tenon that is missing a face cheek. Instead, the face of the workpiece acts as a tenon cheek.

The primary disadvantage is you give up the face shoulder that can conceal the rim of your mortise. And you might be giving up a little strength against lateral forces – sometimes called racking forces.

But you get some real advantages, too. You can use a thick tenon and still have a beefy mortise wall. This is helpful with workbenches and many table constructions in my experience. It makes a joint that is robust enough for drawboring with little risk of you cracking the tenon or the mortise wall.

Plus, you have one less shoulder to fit – there’s no chance that an inside shoulder can interfere with the fit of the shoulder on the outside. Oh, and the joint is less work to make.

I wouldn’t use a bareface tenon when you could easily see the inside surfaces, and a ragged mortise wall might be evident. But for apron tables and the like, it’s definitely a joint to consider.

— Christopher Schwarz