Carving the lamb's tongues onto the posts

Today between a thousand interuptions, I carved out all 32 lamb's tongues onto the 4 posts. The lamb's tongue serve as the transition between the 45 degree angles and the square parts of the posts. There are two sets, one on the octagonal tapers that make up the top 2/3 of the post and the straight octagonal section making up the last 14" at the bottom of each post.

I realized much to my dismay that when I cut the 45 degree sides to make the octagons, I did not take into account the fact that the round cutter would cut longer on one face then the other. I was judging the stop points off the shorter face and when I went to layout the lamb's tongues I realized that I would need to shorten the squared section of the post by 1/4" on both the top and bottom to allow me to carve the lamb's tongue. In the picture above you can see a finished lamb's tongue on the left and the layout for the next one in the middle. Notice that the layout of the right half the profile touches the router cut line while the left is almost a quarter inch away from the router cut line. The upper mark denotes the position where the lamb's tongue was supposed to stop, the line second from the top denotes the actual end location. To be honest I don't think it makes any difference to the final product. I may need to move the headboard down about a 1/4" as well, the design calls for it to attach at the 1/2 way point of the lambs tongue, not sure if it would look right coming out off center.

To carve the profile, I began with a 1" chisel turned backwards - bevel down versus bevel up and removed the bulk of the waste. I have to admit cherry cuts like butter with a sharp chisel. The towel is wrapped around the square area in order to prevent the corners from being damaged while the post is securely held in my bench vise.

I refined the profile using a quarter inch chisel going across the grain and finished with a double cut file using a combination of the half round face and the flat face. I used the 1" chisel to make a sharp line at the base of the tongue where it meets the octagon face.  The picture below shows the lamb's tongue after completing the chisel work but before finishing up with the file. In the end it was taking about 5-7 min to carve and finish each lamb's tongue. The first few took about 10-12 min. I used 220 grit paper on my random orbital sander and carefully polished out the remaining tool marks on each profile.

The completed posts are pictured above. I began to layout out the mortises for the headboard and rails but I finally called it a night. Its been a long day - my wife decided that I needed to help her pickup some firewood logs from her friend's house. It turned out to be 7 van fulls of logs ranging between 15" and 24" in diameter and 30" long. That took a sizeable portion of my afternoon. I split a few of them before deciding that the splitting project would be an excellent project for my two teenage sons. Apparently they beg to differ :-) I have a few trees to cut down around the house so I may wait and rent a log splitter for a day and go nuts on splitting all the wood. I want to get it done ASAP though so that it has a chance to really dry out before next winter.