In Which We Make A Sapele Storm Window Screen Combo Thingy... Part 1

Wood Species: Sapele

The first stormie will be made from ribbon stripe sapele I've been cellaring for my electric car project. It's all well seasoned, but some pieces have developed a bit of a bow sitting around unused. Luckily, I haven't noticed any twisting or cupping: the quarter-sawn grain probably helps a lot.



The wood itself looks beautiful in the right light, and it feels like a crime to  cover it in paint. But according to the interwebs, sapele is a relatively cheap species used to replace mahogany and spanish cedar in exterior trim work.

Joinery Technique: Bridle Joints

After I used the planer to mellow out the bow, I used the table saw to dimension the four main frame pieces according to my cutlist. The sapele is really nice to work with, cutting cleanly and sanding easily, despite the density and hardness. It burns a little during rips, but nowhere as bad as euro-beech, which I otherwise love to work with.
I got to use my finger/box/bridle joint jig for the first time on this project (part 2 of the writeup is still in the works). Unfortunately, I only have 4' of vertical clearance above the table saw in the basement, and since the stiles for all the windows are 54" long, I can only use the jig to cut the rails. Because of that, I decided to put the female half of the joint on the rails since the male tenon can be cut horizontally using a crosscut sled.

The jig worked great, although dust collection could use some work. I used the same 1/4" 1:3 template I used for box joints to cut a 1/4" wide "mortise" in the ends of the rails. Although the adjustable carriage was only incorporated into the jig because the travel was insufficient, it is probably the coolest part of the jig. instead of fiddling with the template, I can lock the position of the fence use the carriage travel to dial in exactly where on the template I want the follower to be. I'm actually impressed with how well that feature works, and how tight I managed to get the tolerances in that part of the jig.

As you can see, the "mortise" is clean and if I could cut the stiles on the jig, would be a perfect mate with the male half of the joint.
Alas, I don't have that luxury, so i used the nibble-nibble crosscut technique to cut the tenons. Because I was stupid, I ended up not planing the stiles to proper (or same) thickness, so cutting the tenons took a little more work than I would have liked. First, I marked off one face as "reference" on all four pieces. Then I cut one side of the tenon for all four joints with the reference face down and flush to the rails. This allowed me to set the depth of cut once for the reference side of all four tenons.

Here's where things get tricky. in order to get the right tenon thickness, I have to measure from the reference face of the stile and set the depth of cut from the non-reference face. Each stile is a different thickness, so I have to readjust the depth of cut for each pair of tenons. If took a little fiddling, and some cleanup work with a chisel and sandpaper, but the joints eventually fit tight and more importantly, square.

(ignore my poor choice of footwear)

Checking for square:

Perfect!

Part 2 will show the results of glueup and milling in the grooves for the glazing and screen frames.