Glue ups are an outside job. Now that the top and apron are one piece it makes workholding so much easier, even on the sawhorses.
This gives me a nice usable work surface to build the leg frames and cross braces on. The leg frames on each side have a wide upper stretcher that is half-lapped into the legs, and a lower stretcher that is held in with drawbored mortise and tenon joints. This makes it very rigid and gives a large surface for the hinges to be installed to up top.
So far I’m very impressed with the Gramercy holdfasts. It’s pretty hard to fathom why holdfasts ever fell out of fashion. Once I had used them for an hour or two making the leg frames I was hooked. Why wouldn’t you want to have a clamp everywhere you could drill a hole ?
Having the dog holes in the apron lets me use them as a face vise sort of as well. Here’s how I set it up to cut the tenon shoulders. The piece is pinched between a bench dog and the wonder dog, and the holdfast keeps it tight to the apron.
It worked surprisingly well.
