| Blog series by Mike Lingenfelter | updated 693 days ago | 4 parts | 3442 reads | 21 comments total |
Part 1: The Design
I wanted to make a small bench what would be dedicated for sharpening. I wanted to have a place where my sharpening stones would be ready to use. I used to have to find a place to set everything up, and sometimes I didn’t do that ahead of time. This meant I might have worked with a tool longer without sharpening. That’s not good, because a dull tool is a dangerous tool.I came up with this simple bench. I made it somewhat heavy, to it to keep it from moving around. I also made it somewha...
Part 2: The Lumber
I chose to use Douglas Fir for this bench. I’m considering using Douglas Fir on a larger workbench I’m planning to build, and wanted to see how it was to work with. The jury is still out for me. For the most part it was an easy wood to work with. Although I had a lot of problems cleaning up my mortises. The sides of the mortises running with the grain tore and splinter very easily. The end grain cleaned up very nicely. Maybe this problem was caused by the “quality” of lumber I ended up...
Part 3: The Base
The base is assembled with mortise and tenons. I also pinned the tenons using the drawbore technique. For some reason I didn’t take many pictures of the mortise and tenon work. I’ll describe some the process I used. I first hogged out the mortises on the drill press.Then I hand chiseled the mortises. This is where I had some issues with tareout/splintering on the sides of the mortises that ran with the grain. I always made sure I was working with a sharp chisel, when I worked on these s...
Part 4: The Top
For the top I wanted something that could stand up to getting wet. I thought I would use a laminate countertop (Formica). At our Home Depot you can get small 2’ x 4’ pieces of laminate. The selection isn’t that large, but I think I found something that worked for me. I glued and screwed to pieces of ¾” plywood together. Then I used some scrap pieces of oak to trim off the edges. I then applied some contact adhesive to the top and the laminate and put them together. I put small ...
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