Logan Cabinet Shoppe

In the power tool world they're called jigs. In the hand tool world, we call them appliances. Whatevery you call them, they are indispensible accessories that you will use in your shop on an almost daily basis. From bench hooks to shooting boards and winding sticks to pinch rods, you can build them all with nothing more than a few offcuts and a little creativity.

Shannon Rogers' recent blog post about the George Walker seminar from WIA reminded me that I've been meaning to post this blog for a few weeks now. I recently purchased and viewed George's new DVD "Unlocking the Secrets of Traditional Design". After watching the DVD, all I can say is "Yes, finally!" For anyone who designs their own pieces, or wants to step outside of the world of preprinted plans and start designing their own pieces, this DVD is an invaluable tool. It's clear, concise and most of all, simple to understand.

While all of the information presented in the video was not new to me, there was enough in it to make me start rethinking about a design I have in the works. Let's start at the beginning with a brief overview. George starts us out by looking at a magnificent 18th century New England church entryway and the architecture surrounding the door. To the uninitiated, it seems off topic. What does this door have to do with designing furniture? However, George continues on to break down this piece of architecture into simple elements and then explains how traditional furniture designs were based on architecture, and it all begins to come together.

From there, George takes us back to his shop, and begins to talk about how furniture is composed of simple geometric shapes. He demonstrates how even the most complex pieces of antique furniture can be broken down into simple shapes with simple ratios. Most gratifying of all, he does this with a simple pair of dividers and a straight edge. There's no measuring, no dial calipers, no calculators and no complicated formulas. It's traditional design in its simplest and most basic form.

The way in which George demonstrates the different design principles is exactly how I would image it would likely have been done in an 18th century shop. Having rulers that could only measure down to 1/8" to 1/16" or so, and probably not extremely accurately at that, it would make sense that our woodworking forefathers would not have relied on measurements. They simply would have been much too inaccurate. However, as George so skillfully demonstrates in this DVD, with a simple pair of dividers, one can be extremely precise.

George uses a handful of basic ratios in the video, such as 1:2, 2:3, etc. He also touches on some of the ratios used in the classical column orders of architecture and describes how these ratios migh be used to proportion different parts of a piece of furniture. George uses the proportions of the Doric order in his examples, but it is very obvious from his overview of a couple of the other orders how using a different order might change the feel of a piece to make it feel lighter or stronger. While not an all inclusive delve into the orders, it is enough of an intro to make one want to pull out Chippendale's Director and start studying.

One of the things that George does not touch on in his video is the use of the oft debated Golden Ratio. There have been a lot of articles written about the Golden Ratio's use in furniture design and for a log time, many furniture builders, myself included, embraced the idea and ran with it. However, after using the ratio in previous designs, I'm not so convinced that it was a common practice to use it historically, and I think this is why George doesn't mention it in his video.

The fact is, the Golden Ratio isn't something that is simple to proportion when building furniture with a simple pair of dividers. It's simple to do on paper with dividers alone, but the actual implementation of it on a board isn't so simple without making templates because the Golden Ratio isn't based on whole number proportions. However, the simple ratios and column order proportions that George demonstrates in his DVD are easy to use on paper and in practice on a board.

The final thing George does is enlightening, especially to those thinking that his methods would only apply to traditional period furniture. To show that this isn't so, George designs a chest of drawers, in real time. On the left side, he designs the piece in a period style while on the right side, he uses the same proportioning tools to design a contemporary piece. The result proves that timeless design is timeless.

In summary, in answer to the question of whether I would recommend this DVD, I respond a resounding "YES!" While all of the information may not be new to you, there is plenty of information to make you think, presented in a way that a beginner with no design experience can still grasp. It's definately a DVD for all skill levels. Even if you have no intention of designing your own furniture from the ground up, the video will still give you valuable tools and techniques that you can use in your shop. The demonstration of the usefulness of a simple pair of dividers is worth the price of admission in itself.

While I don't always go through the trouble of drawing out projects in a lot of detail, I felt that my current design project was going to be fairly complex so I thought I'd do some additional detail design. So I started with my general outline from the last post and began breaking it down using some of the design tools I mentioned below and some others I have mentioned in a previous post to work out some of the smaller details of the wall unit.

I started from the bottom to work out the base molding first. Imposing Ionic column proportions on the height of the base cabinet, I used the height of the column pedestal (1/5 of the height of the base cabinet) to arrive at the height of the base molding. This looked good to me so I proceeded to work out the proportions of the feet.

Most pieces of this nature look sort of like a built in unit, with a solid base molding that wraps around the piece. While this looks ok, I wanted to refine my piece a little and make it stand out as a piece of furniture and not a built in unit. So I decided to give the piece the illusion of having bracket feet like a chest of drawers would have. I say illusion because I don't really want to make the cases the typical dovetailed boxes on top of frames with feet like a chest of drawers would be since most of the side feet will be hidden by the adjacent boxes. It would be a lot of extra work that would never be seen. So instead I'm going to apply the "feet" to the fronts of all the cases and the outer sides of the outermost cases only just like a baseboard molding would be, except I'm going to scroll the base molding to look like furniture feet.

To work out the design of the "foot" I played with several of the proportional tools until I came up with a design that looked good to my eye. I started by imposing the proportions of an ionic column and entablature on the height of the foot. The column and entablature are broken down into six equal parts to arive at the height of the entablature (1/6) and column (5/6). Using the proportion of the entablature, I established the height of the sticking that I would put on the top edge of the base molding, i.e. 1/6 of the height of the base molding. From here I played with some other proportioning "rules" until I got a foot that looked nice to me and seemed to fit the proportions of the overall piece well.

After playing with some proportions for awhile, this is the "foot" design I came up with. It has a similar style to some bracket feet I have seen on some antique pieces from the middle third of the 18th century and to my eye looks very appealing. You can see how a lot of the different parts of the "foot" are related to each other and ultimately the height of the base molding.

After going through similar exercises for the cornice molding, waist molding and doors, this is what I came up with. Many of the parts are proportioned based on some of these "rules", however, as I mentioned in the previous post, there were also a few "it just looks good there" moments that have no basis on geometry, common ratios or column orders. Sometimes you just have to go with what looks good to your eye.

I'm still a little undecided about the top of the piece as it seems a little light in relation to the bottom. I think it's because we decided to go with open shelves at the top instead of doors. I may still decide to add doors to the top to balance out the piece or possibly add face frames to the front of the upper cases to give the top a little more needed "weight".

What do you think?

It's been kind of slow in my shop lately. I haven't really been working on anything in particular now that the built-in and my shop desk have been done for some time. Summer is always a slow time for me in the shop as my family prefers outdoor activities when the weather is nice. However, I am gearing up and preparing for a major project for the fall once the summer activities slow down some and the vacations are all but over. So I thought this would be a good opportunity to share some insights on how I design a piece of furniture. I don't work from pre-printed plans but I will use pictures and/or drawings as inspiration for just about all of my pieces. However, as my wife will tell you, the pictures are merely a starting point.

So it will be with my newest undertaking as well. Ever since we finished renovating our family room, we've been making do with a cheap Walmart TV stand. Other projects and pieces of furniture have been higher priorities up until now so we've simply dealt with the ugly plastic veneered particleboard stand, knowing that we would design and build a nicer piece at some point in the future.

My wife had an idea of what she wanted, but I always like her to find a few pictures of ideas that she likes as a starting point. She knows that I won't build the piece as pictured since the factory made stuff is typically junk, but the concept is really what I'm after, not the design. So for our family room, we found several pictures like this one.

Now media units like these are obviously not period pieces, however, whether you are into period furniture or modern contemporary styles, the methods of designing and constructing them are no different. At first glance, this might seem like a very intimidating piece. It's pretty tall and very wide and there are a lot of doors, shelves and possibly some complex moldings. The trick to designing and building pieces like these is to break them down into small manageable steps. In this case, I'll break this down into 6 pieces of furniture that will later go together to look like one large piece. If you were designing an 8 foot tall Newport style secretary, the process would be no different.

Now, while my preference for building furniture is to use tools and techniques similar to those used in the 18th and 19th centuries, when it comes to designing, I humbly embrace CAD drawing programs. Not because they can make accurate drawings (which they obviously can), but because it's so easy for me to scale drawings, proportion parts and move pieces around without having to have a large drafting area and a lot of pencils and erasers. I'm working on my drawing skills, especially when it comes to things like carving, but for rough dimensioning and proportioning and just getting some general ideas about scale and proportion together, CAD is hard to beat.

I like to start by figuring out the general proportions of the piece. In this instance, because I needed to proportion 6 differnt cases, I started with the bottom center case for the TV. My wife and I figured out how high we wanted the case to be based on the height of our seating furniture and the distance that most of it was placed from the TV. With the height of the center case established, just about all of the general dimensions of the six cases were in some way based on the chosen height for the center case. To illustrate this, I'll describe the process I used to arrive at the general dimensions for each of the six cases for this project.

We decided that the center case for the TV should be about 30" high. I decided to make the width of this case a 2/3 ratio of height to width. This made the case about 45" wide, which turned out would be a good width for the TV which is 41" wide. The side bottom cases were figured out next. Again, the height was set at 30" to be even with the center case. Using the 2/3 ratio again, this time width to height, resulted in the side cases being about 20" wide. For the height of the top side cases, I applied a 5/9 ratio (height to width) for the entire area covered by the top cases and the open space for the TV. This entire rectangle has dimensions of about 47" tall by about 85" wide, which made the top side cases 20" wide by 47" tall. Finally, I made the bridge case about 1/4 the height of the side top cases or about 12" tall.

After figuring out the proportions for the front of the case, I moved to the top view to determine case depth. A lot of this is dependant upon what will go into each case. I decided on a stepped design for aesthetic reasons as well as practical reasons. Not only does the step back of the top and side cases look nice, it aids in hiding the joints of the moldings.

The cases are going to be modular to make them easier to move. Therefore, the moldings cannot span more than one case. If the side cases were the same depth as the center cases, the base, waist and cornice moldings would have a visible vertical cut line where each case comes together. This joint would be immediately obvious and not very attractive. However, by stepping the side cases back from the center cases, the moldings can meet at an inside miter, which will hide the joint much better and help it to look like one continuous mitered molding and hence one solid case instead of six separate cases.

So I started with the bottom center case again since that is where the TV and A/V components will be housed. I decided on about 21" deep for this case. To arrive at the step back for the side cases, I subtracted 3" from the center case depth to get about 18" for the bottom side cases. Then to arive at the top case depths, I subtracted 6" from the corresponding bottom case depth to arrive at a 15" depth for the top center case and a 12" depth for the top side cases.

With the front and top views drawn, it was a simple matter to transfer the dimensions to create a right side view of the cases. From a drawing perspective, this is about all I will do. Going through this exercise helps me to arrive at the general case dimensions for each case. From here, I can build all 6 cases and then begin the process of fitting everything out. The doors, drawers, shelves and moldings aren't really important at this point because their dimensions will all be dependant upon the final dimensions of the six cases. All of those parts will be gauged as I go along. This allows me to make adjustments as I go as opposed to working from a cut list which makes adjustments challenging.

One final note on designing your own pieces. There are a lot of proportioning ratios that generally look good to the eye, like 2/3, 5/9, 3/5, golden ratio, etc. These ratios can be used as tools for designing a piece's general proportions. However, they are ultimately just tools and your eye should be the final judge as to whether something looks right or not. Sometimes, what looks right to you just doesn't fit any kind of "rule". It just looks right, so you go with it. That's the best part about designing pieces yourself instead of working from pre-packaged plans. The final piece has your character designed into it, not some one else's.

With the construction of the saws completed, all that was left to do was to file in the teeth. Commercial saw manufacturers typically cut the teeth in with a machine, resulting in perfectly spaced teeth. I don't have this equipment, nor do I wish to invest in it, so I use a file. I think teeth that are hand filed in end up working a little more smoothly anyway due to the minor variation in spacing that results from hand filing in the teeth. The random spacing theoretically reduces harmonic chatter, if only slightly. In my experience using saws in which I've filed in the teeth compared to saws I have with machine cut (but hand filed) teeth, I can notice a slight difference, but it is only slight.

I set the tooth spacing by drawing lines with a CAD program and printing it out full scale. I place the piece of paper in the vise with the saw plate and file a small notch at each line. This one happens to be 12 PPI (or 11 TPI).

Once I've filed a notch at each gullet location by making one or two passes with the file, I remove the paper. I then go back and make several more passes at each notch to deepen the gullet and rough shape each tooth. At this point, I'm just trying to get close to the final rake angle so I don't use a guide to set the angle of the file. In fact, I'm just trying to keep the front of each tooth vertical at this point (i.e. 0 degrees of rake) and I do this by eye. I file just until the flats on top of each tooth disappear or almost disappear and no further. I file the initial notches and shape all the teeth from one side of the saw plate, prior to setting the teeth.

Once all of the teeth have been rough shaped, I set the teeth. I use a plier type saw set for this. I begin at the heel of the saw and work toward the toe setting every other tooth. I'm just trying to set the top 1/3 or so of each tooth, not the entire tooth. If you try to set the entire tooth, you might break them off. Once I've reached the toe, I flip the saw around in the vise and set the remaining teeth so that each tooth is alternately set when I'm done. If you make a mistake and set two teeth in a row in the same direction, don't worry about it. It won't affect the performance of the saw and it can always be fixed at a future sharpening if needed. Do not try to set a tooth in the opposite direction of it's original set or you are about gauranteed to break the tooth off.

After I have set the teeth, I like to joint them lightly with just one or two light passes with a 6" mil file. I hold the file tight to a block of wood which acts as a fence to keep the file square to the tooth line. This seems counter productive to the initial shaping I just worked so hard to do, but jointing lightly after setting the teeth ensures that each tooth will be the same height after sharpening, even if the set is a little uneven. It also provides a reference flat on top of each tooth to guide my final filing.

Another aid for doing the final filing of the teeth is to darken the flats from jointing. You can use a permanent marker for this, and I did for years, but the teeth tend to chew up the marker tip pretty quickly so you never really use a marker until the ink is gone. Machinists layout dye is another good option, however, it's awful messy.

My solution is to use an old planemaker's trick, a candle. By running the saw teeth back and fourth several times through the flame of a regular old candle, you coat the saw teeth with a thin coat of soot. The dull black soot covers well and provides a good reference for teeth that have been filed and those that have not. You don't hold the candle in one spot for so long that the saw plate heats up (this could ruin the temper of the steel) rather you keep the candle moving continuously to "paint" on the soot.

With the teeth coated in soot, I begin the final filing and sharpening of the teeth. Now that the teeth are set, I can't just file all of the teeth from the same side. I need to file only the teeth that are leaning away from me. I also now use a guide block to guide the angle of the file in order to set the desired rake angle. Here, it's about 4 degrees.

The guide block is simply a small scrap of soft wood with a small pilot hole drilled centered on each edge. I then draw a line tangent to the hole at the desired rake angle. The rake angle should lean toward the handle. So in this picture you can see how I've noted on the guide block which side the handle needs to be on. The rake angle leans toward the handle from bottom left to top right at an angle of 4 degrees from vertical (the opposite edge of the guide block is a mirror image of this edge). I insert the file into the pilot hole with the right side flat parallel to the rake angle line. All I need to do now is file with the wood block held level and I will maintain the 4 degree rake angle.

Again, I start at the heel and work toward the toe, filing every other tooth (only those leaning away from me). I file straight across (90 degrees) the saw plate because these are rip teeth. I make only one or two passes on each tooth until the flats on top of each tooth are smaller by about half. Be careful because this goes faster than you might think, especially on these smaller teeth. It takes only one or two light strokes of the file.

Here you can see where every other gullet has been filed as noted by the shiny gullet. The candle soot remains on the unfiled teeth. Once I reach the toe, I flip the saw around in the vise so that the unfiled teeth, which were leaning toward me before, are now leaning away from me and the saw handle is on the left.

I NOW REVERSE THE GUIDE BLOCK ON THE FILE. The opposite side of the guide block is a mirror image of the first side. It has an arrow pointing to the left where the handle should now be and the rake angle is tangent to the left side of the hole and should lean from the bottom right to the top left at 4 degrees from vertical. The file is inserted with it's left edge parallel to the rake angle line. This is an extremely important step. If you keep the guide block in the same orientation as before, the rake angle will be all wrong and when you file the teeth you'll end up filing them into little toothpick points, so make sure you reset the file in the guide block so that the rake angle is correct.

With the guide block on the file switched to its proper orientation and the saw flipped around in the vise, I can now file the remaining teeth. Again, I start from the heel and work toward the toe filing straight across because these are rip teeth. I file only until the flats on top of each tooth disappear and no further, even if the teeth are different sizes (the size isn't important, the final height is). Once I reach the toe, the filing is complete and the teeth should be very sharp.

I perform one final step prior to using the saw. I like to joint the sides of the teeth to remove the filing burrs and smooth the teeth out some. To do this, I place the saw plate on the edge of my bench and with an oiled hard Arkansas slip stone, I make one pass with light pressure from heel to toe, keeping the stone flat to the side of the saw plate. I then flip the saw over and joint the other side the same way, making only one pass from heel to toe.

Once I've done the side jointing, I'm finished with the sharpening. I use a little turpentine on a rag to clean the remaining soot from the blade and the saw is ready to go back on it's peg until it's called on to cut some tenon cheeks.

Here's a shot of the finished rip teeth. They're not perfectly spaced, not all exactly the same size and likely not all exactly the same rake angle, however, they don't need to be perfect and hand filed saws never are. In fact, the imperfections are what make hand filed saws such a pleasure to use. They cut smoothly with no vibration or chatter and seem to glide through the wood.

If you don't already sharpen your own hand saws I hope this will encourage you to give it a try. It's really not that hard to do and if you just take it step by step and go slow it's very difficult to ruin a saw and near impossible to take it beyond repair. If you make a mistake, it's a simple task to rejoint the teeth down and start over.

Oh yeah, and the obligatory test cut was smooth, fast and straight. Can't ask for any more than that ; )!

With all of the rain we've been getting here on the East coast, I had some time to finish up my saws this weekend; well, except for filing the teeth. We left off the last pst with the backs finished and the plates cut to size and the bluing sanded off. Now I needed to insert the plates into the backs. I used a method described in the Grammercy saw kits by using a softwood "bat" to tap the plat into the back. I started at one corner and worked it down gradually.

This isn't as easy as it sounds. You have to tap and pivot and tap some more trying to keep one end in while you tap the other end down. The back holds the plate very tightly so you need to get it in exactly the right spot when you start it. It's too tight to slide the plate down after it's started without buckling the plate. It's sort of like West Side Story...fighting and dancing at the same time.

I did finally manage to get both done. The second one was slightly easier than the first, but not by much.

With the saw plates and back assembled, I turned my attention to the handles. I glued the templates I made to a piece of straight grained walnut with liquid hide glue.

I bored holes to locate the concave curves and finished cutting the blanks out with a turning saw. I cleaned up to the template lines with carving gouges, bench chisels and spokeshave. I also bored the holes for the split nuts and cut the kerf and mortsie for the saw plate while the stock was still flat. It's much easier to do this now.

With all the holes bored and the kerfs cut, all that was left to do was finish the shaping. I used a rasp, file and several grits of sandpaper to do this. This is the fun part. The best thing about making your own saw handles is that you can make them fit your hand perfectly. No sharp corners or pinch points, just a perfect smooth fit to your hand. I finished with a coat of linseed oil and I'll add several more over the next few days.

I didn't take any pics of making the split nuts, however, the Norse Woodsmith has a good writeup on that and I used his method. The only difference in my split nuts is that I used lock washers in place of the square nut, ala the Grammercy saws. It's easier in my opinion and they aren't seen anyway.

Now I just need to file the teeth.

I have never been thrilled with my current tenon saw and have wanted to replace it for some time. Not having the money to spend on the style of saw I want, I decided to make one. Some time back I made a couple of dovetail saws as practice for the larger saw. When I saw this saw in the Williamsburg book, I knew right away that was the style I wanted to make. Based on the typical size of a dado plane, I estimate this saw plate to be about 19" long. I think that might be a little long for me for routine tenon work so I decided to make mine about 16".

So I ordered a piece of 0.025" thick 1095 spring steel from McMaster Carr. The cheapest length of the steel was enough for three saw plates so using a pair of aviation snips I cut the spring steel into a 14" piece for a crosscut backsaw, a 16" piece for a rip tenon saw and a 19" piece for a future saw TBD at a later date (maybe a 19" long Kenyon style tenon saw). I filed the cut edges to remove the rough cut edges and the deformed steel resulting from cutting the steel with the aviation snips. The steel comes blued but I decided to sand the bluing off down to the raw steel.

I made the backs like the backs for the second dovetail saw that I blogged about some months back. I started with 14 ga. steel angle and used an iron bench vise to close the bend. These 1" angle pieces were a little more difficult to completely close than the 3/4" angle and needed to be finished with a hammer on the anvil of my machinist vise. Unfortunately this left some marking on the backs that I had to file out.

So I clamped the back to the bench and draw filed each side to remove as much of the hammer marks as I could remove with moderate effort. This picture is part way through the process and you can see some of the low spots and spots that have been filed.

This picture shows where I stopped. There are still a few marks but they would be too much work to remove and require too much metal removal which would weaken the back too much so I decided it was not worth it to remove them. I also cut and filed the decorative curve into the front of the back and filed some small chamfers on the lower edge and around the curved front edge to dress it up a little and remove the rough sharp edges. Finally, I polished the back slightly on a stitched buffing wheel on the grinder dressed with emery compound.

Ever since the first time I read Roy Underhill's book "The Woodwright's Apprentice" I've wanted to build a version of his standing desk. I always thought it would be a great piece to have in the shop for making drawings, laying an open book or magazine or setting my coffee. It would also give me a logical place to keep pencils, scissors and other small odds and ends that typically get lost at the bottom of boxes and cabinets.

So over the last couple of weeks I finally got around to building one. I modified Roy's design slightly by adding a drawer to my desk. To do so I had to make the sides slightly higher and obviously add a bottom rail to the front under the drawer as well as a frame for the drawer to sit on. I also shortened the height about 3" from the drawing in the book as I'm pretty short and the original 48" height seemed just a little high for me to work at comfortably.

The piece is made of Eastern white pine, as with most of the pieces I make for the shop, because it's cheap, readily available where I live, cheap, easy to work, and oh yeah, cheap. I also like the look of it as long as it's not full of huge knots (a few pin knots are ok). The inside is currently just a big open space. I'll add a simple gallery in the future, but for now it will serve as extra storage. I'll also divide up the drawer in the future but that's a project for another day.

I'm glad that I finally got around to making this piece. It is certainly a welcome addition to the shop and much better looking than the piece that used to occupy this space (ugly plywood junk cabinet). It's unfinished right now as I have not decided whether to just oil and wax it or give it a couple coats of milk paint and oil. I think I'll just leave it alone for now and let it get used to it's new home for awhile. The finish can wait.

 

So here it is. The result of my avoidable mistake. Actually, this one isn't the worst one. I'm a little too embarrassed to show the really bad one. At any rate, this joint does not fit together tight enough to hold without being fixed. Sometimes you can get away with a slightly loose joint when using hide glue, especially if only one of the tails is loose but the others are good. In this case, the entire joint is bad. It would fall out on it's own so it needs to be fixed.

I begin making the repair by making a really long wedge. I want something with almost no taper when it's cut to size. The last thing I want to do is drive in a fast tapering wedge and split the drawer side. Then I'd have no choice but to make a new piece. Instead, I take a stick from the cutoff bin and plane a long taper into it. I clamp one end to the bench (you can just barely see the clamp bar below the bench) and plane a taper into it by planing right off the bench. I want something that basically feathers at the end.

The resulting wedge looks something like this. The end is very fragile but I'll cut it off gradually as I fit the wedge to the gap.

I cut a length off of the stick about 1-1/2" long using a chisel. I then make the wedge the width of the tail with the same chisel. I begin fitting the wedge by cutting a clean edge on the wedge with the chisel. I try the fit in the gap and if it is too loose, I pare the end back. I want the fit so that I can push the wedge in with finger pressure and it closes the gap completely. Be careful here as a wedge that fits too tightly can easily split the pin board. You should be able to insert and remove the wedge without any help from a mallet. The glue will make the fit tighter later so don't make it too tight now.

Fit all of the wedges dry before you begin gluing anything in place. Once you start gluing, you can't make any adjustments. Make sure everything fits snug but not too tight and then label every joint and it's respective wedge so you can be sure to put the wedges back in exactly the same spot and orientation when the glue goes on. You need to work relatively quickly. This is where the slow setting time of liquid hide glue really shines. The slow set time gives you plenty of time to glue and assemble the entire drawer before inserting any wedges. You may need to tap the wedges in once the glue is on but do so gently. You don't want to snap a wedge off below the surface once it has glue on it.

Once the glue has dried, carefully pare the wedges down to the surface with a really sharp chisel. There's still a chance of breaking them off below the joint surface so take it slow. Once the wedges are pared low enough, you can switch to a plane and clean up the joint surface as you normally would a joint that didn't need repair. The wedges are readily visible in the final joint as it's very difficult to match the end grain perfectly to make them disappear. Really, I'm probably the only one that will ever notice them, but they will serve as a constant reminder of my mistake and hopefully prevent me from making it again.