Top Secret: American Chess Table- Fitting the parts together

The parts have now been cut and processed, but do they fit?  All of the drawing, planning and cutting comes down to how everything fits.

So for all of the planning and careful cutting, I need to point out that there are many opportunities to adjust and custom fit each piece.

The measurements for this project required an offset for the drawer sides on the legs of 3/16 of an inch.  With the tenons and the offset, we cut the mortises at exactly the measurements required.  Each piece, each joint and every mortise had to be sanded, pared down or trimmed in order for the best fit.  It also did not help that when I cut the tenons on the drawer pieces, I screwed up two cuts on the shoulders and had to adjust for those as well (remember this is my first attempt at this!).  After a few hours of adjustments, we were able to dry fit the entire table together with the help of clamps.  The table stood on its own for the very first time!  We are making progress.

Dry fitting the table together:

dry fitted table

Dry fitted view from above (if you look at the north/south joint, you can see where I screwed up the shoulder cut!  There is a little gap you can see before the joint.  Thankfully, I had enough wood left on the shoulder it did not matter to the joint.):

dry fitted corner

Now we need to get the glue bottle out, and proceed!