Sawing and Gluing the Nightstand Tops
2013.04.16
When I purchased the wood for this project, I selected a fairly wide piece of alder for the tops, so I would only have one glue line. It was also long enough that I figured I could get all four pieces from this one board, so the color and grain would match. Of course I knew I would have to work around knots and other defects. As it turned out, the margins were slim, and one piece has a couple knots. I decided to use the circular saw and guide rail; for all the setup time, I could have just done it with a handsaw. I cut all the pieces slightly oversized, to be trimmed after glue-up.
I spent some time looking at different arrangements of the boards until I was reasonably happy. Then I planed the glue-line edges. I don’t use the jointer plane guide very often, but I wanted to make sure I had square edges.
Here you can see the knots on the underside of one board as I was preparing to apply the glue. One of them is very close to where the underside bevel will pass by. Hopefully not too close…
Gluing