Tenons & lessons learned

It took an entire week, but all 32 mortise & tenons have been fitted. If I learned nothing else from this project, it’s that floating tenons are the way to go when you are using hard exotics. Rounding over the ends of the Jatoba tenons was not a fun process. In softer woods it’s a breeze with a file and a chisel, but in Jatoba the file would skip a lot, and cleaning up the shoulder end-grain required a mallet. Unlike softer woods Jatoba has no give, so if a tenon was off a little in thickness it had to be fine tuned by hand. I enjoyed the process, but needless to say next time I’m going to use a faster joinery method.