The College Joint
The mitred bridle joint was another step up in complexity. I started the joint during the college session but ran out of time before I could complete it, so I finished it at home.
I was very happy with the way the finished joint turned out. It was a challenging joint to mark out and cut accurately, particularly because of the mitred shoulders, but the finished result showed that the techniques we'd been practising were starting to come together.
Taking It Further — My Own Jigs
I decided not to stop at making the joint for college. I wanted to see if I could develop a more accurate and repeatable way of producing it, so I designed and made my own jigs specifically for the mitred bridle joint.
I designed a series of jigs to help with the different stages of cutting the joint, including the shoulders, mitres and mortice. This allowed me to reproduce the joint more consistently and also gave me the opportunity to apply the design and problem-solving skills I use in my home workshop to something I'd learned at college.
The Finished Joint
This was a good example of how my college work and workshop experience complement each other — learning the traditional technique at college, then experimenting with my own methods to see how I could improve the process.
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