Today is a national holiday (it’s Eid ul-Adha, the big Muslim holiday celebrating Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son) and I was able to get in a little shop time today! But first, define shop. I needed to work on my dovetails for the aprons on my Lego Table, but had no place to do any vertical clamping. So out to the balcony I went. And voila!

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I had to use one of the little metal vertical bars (you can see one on the far right of the above picture) to support the back side of the clamp, and bunches of scrap wood to support everything and keep my piece straight up and down. Here’s a closeup:

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I used the balcony wall as a tool rest, which is a little scary being on the fifth floor and all! But I didn’t drop anything. I also tried to get a shot of the mosque in the background of the picture above, you know, cuz of the holiday and all. :^)

Now I had to get ultra super creative when it came time to mark the tails (I did two pins-first joints and two tails-first joints – I think I liked tails-first better). Here I used the clothes drying rack (slash secondary tool rest) with a plastic stool resting on blocks to get the right height for marking the mating piece.

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I had to do a little paring on one of my tails, so I resorted to my bone clamp with ratcheting double-femur action. I was too lazy to go get my mallet so I grabbed a scrap of wood to help my dull chisel along.

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At the end of the day (only a couple hours of “shop” time), I managed to finish two of the four corners. I’ve done all the marking on the other two, so next time I’ll be able to jump right into it.