Auto-regulator, Chapter 3: Making the vertical elements

One of the primary design elements of the case was the use of three way miters. In the pedestal, as I've explained, they're not true three-way miters. The movement case is a different story. But there's more to it than that.

Because the facings of the vertical elements are book-matched pieces of solid stock, there's a miter joint around the outer front edge of the vertical pieces. And, because the inside of the vertical pieces will be visibly sculpted, I needed to have matierial to sculpt away. So, the front vertical pieces are both three part laminations: solid core, with book-matched, mitered solid face pieces.

Mitering an end-grain joint is a fairly straightforward affair. Typically, it's used in case constuction, and the biggest miter joints I've usually seen are on things like blanket chests. That may be up to 18" worth of miter, but it's not too hard. In this case, I had a few more variables to consider. First, the stock was re-sawn out of a larger piece. It was mostly flat, and behaved fairly well. Second, the joint has to come together flatly, and mate with the solid core. So, if there was any concavity, or convexity in the joint, I'm going to have issues, because either the middle or the ends won't mate cleanly with the core. Lastly, these pieces are long. 32" of walnut, plus extra to trim back, and 42" of maple, with extra. So they needed to be long, straight, and perfect.

I trust my table saw to do many things. But a few days after being resawn, the pieces were ever so slightly bowed... and I didn't trust that operation to go smoothly on the saw. So, I rough-sawed the miters on the saw, and built a long-miter shooting board to do the rest.

Lastly, I needed everything to be dead straight. Given the thicknesses of everything involved, I wasn't too worried that things would go awry, but to be sure, I made box beams to provide flat reference surfaces for gluing, and glued everything up.