Illusional Illumination

Those of you in the posh seats what have been paying attention will have realised that a new project is under way, a little bit of which will be a particularly nasty little, three way corner joint, four of which will sit atop this latest offering, a Japanese style lamp, shown in the colour plates of Alan Peter's book, 'Cabinet Making, the Professional Approach'.

In case you hadn't worked it out, one of these joints is difficult to make...four of the things linked together is well nigh bloody impossible!  But the impossible becomes simple if Domino jointing is used but its absolutely critical that all the component parts meet and match.  Any little 'step' is going to stick out like the proverbial...

























Firstly, I decided to use a couple of 30mm boards of American Cherry, which were machined to 22 plus a 'gnats todger' and then hand planed to exactly 22mm square, which is just about the smallest size you can comfortably use in a Domino, bearing in mind that the doms themselves are only 20mm wide.

Having marked out the centre line of each slot, positioned with a pencil line....

















...I then marked out each Dom mortise with a big 'D' (shown above).

Unusually for me, I realised the application of a bit of brain power (ha!) could result in a way to exactly register the machine on any face, so I built a tight fitting box to ensure that the edge the Domino rested against it.

All I needed to do was to cut the first mortise...

















...spin the wood through 90deg to reveal another 'D' and the new slot would correspond exactly with the original.

What wasn't quite so clever was that the mortises weren't in the centre of the timber as they were 'out' by a mm, which caused a little bit of re-jiggling to be done when the joining rails and their mortises were cut.  Once I got that sorted out, it was reasonably straight forward to cut all the other bits.