Since I haven’t chopped a lot of mortices since about 1994 when I built a mission style bedside table pair (over 60+ mortices)… Ugh! I am going to practice creating the mortices and then draw boring them to connect the two sides of the table leaf. Here is a good article about draw-boring a table top and the reason to do it over just edge-gluing the boards together: To Trust or Reinforce? by Richard Maguire.
The goal is to be half-way competent when I actually start working on the Oak wood which has been setting acclimating to my house for over a year.
Obviously I used scrap wood for these practice runs:
2X4s from a trestle table I made this summer
Some 2X10 from the wood I created my benchtop from last year
Hard Maple from the wood I built my bench’s deadman
Gallery Showing Some of the Pin Design Elements
Here is a series of images from the board I used to produce the various design elements for the pins.