Shoe Shelves, Part 1

The shoe storage situation in our house is lacking, and it's finally time to make something for it.  The current situation is shown below, and that's not all the shoes: there are others scattered about as well.  It's a small table that once belonged to my wife's mother.  I refinished it last year (or two?) and we'll use it for something else.

Current shoe storage

My plan is to replace the current small table and the basket with two matching small shelves, each the same height as the current small table (about 24 1/4" tall).  To fit the area, one will be 20" long, the other 22".  Each table will be 12" deep.

Here's the Sketchup drawing

Here's a closer view, showing some more detail.

Detail view

The four legs are 1 1/2" square, the aprons and rails are relatively narrow at 1 1/4" wide to maximize shoe space, and the shelf boards are 1 1/2" wide.  I'm using red alder that was formerly a blanket chest that someone was getting rid of.  All stock started out approximately 3/4" thick (the legs were glued up).

All of the joints will be mortise and tenon.  This will be a LOT of m&t joints.  Each shoe shelf will have 20 m&t joints, plus 4 or 6 small mortises for the buttons that will attach the top.

So far, I've milled up all the pieces and marked out the joints.  Tomorrow I start cutting the joints.

The aprons, rails and shelf boards and some of the tools used to get them to size

The two tops: I'm not happy with the color match of the smaller top and 
will cut off the right-most 3" and replace with something better matched

Eight legs squared up, ready to cut to length

Arranging the legs for a pleasing color and grain

Marking the tops of the legs for relative position and table number

Marking the rail locations and mortise extents on the legs

Ganging the long rails to mark tenon shoulders together

Lately I've been using a homemade 3/8" (fixed) mortise gauge for my mortises - on the right in the pic below.  But there was a problem in that the pin further from the fence did not protrude the same as the first pin.  When I adjusted the pin to make it match the other, I mangled it a little bit.  

Marking the tenons with a mortise gauge

The shape of the mortise gauge pins is shown below and they are a little fragile.

The shape of the mortise gauge pins

I'm going to replace them with conical pins like on the Marples gauge on the left above.  In the mean time, I'm using the Marples gauge for the rest of the project.

Marking out the mortises on the legs

The reference faces on the legs are the inside faces.  The aprons and rails are not centered on the legs, but closer to the outside faces (1/8" reveal).  For some reason, it seems natural to reference the mortise gauge off the adjacent face that is closer to the mortise. But I believe it is better to have the inside faces (the ones that receive the joinery) as the reference faces.  In doing so, I had to figure out the gauge setting to get the mortises in the proper position to give the rails that 1/8" reveal.

All for now.  Tomorrow, I will be forming mortises and tenons all day long.  And I'm certain I won't finish all of them in whatever time I have tomorrow - this will take a few days.