I had built my bench with Douglas Fir 4×4s from Home Depot. I kept the cutoffs and decided to use them for the carcass. I had also bought two 2 1/4” turning blanks (with Karson at the woodworking show) for making rolling pins. After completing one of the pins, I decided I did not really want to try that again, so I will use the other blank for the drawer fronts.

The DF was only about 50% usable (lots of knots). It also was much weaker than I anticipated. Several attempts at dovetailing the carcass just did not work out, so I went back to good old biscuits. I really do love the way that the DF looks when you get premium pieces of it, like on top of the box.

The turning blank was split into four drawer fronts, and this determined the whole size of the piece which is about 18”x10” and 12” deep. The fronts ended up a bit less than a half inch thick so I decided to build the drawers and just attach them. The drawers are out of poplar. I decided to cheat here and just miter the corners and they will be pinned with dowels or splines. The bottoms are 1/4” mdf. I plan to line them with soft drawer liner anyway. The lowest drawer will slide on the bottom, while the other three will have wooden rails screwed to the carcass.

Pictures are of:
1) The starting pile of DF and the maple blank
2) The drawer strategy with poplar sides
3) A mockup of what it will look like. Nothing is glued, sanded, or finished.

Steve
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I still like the idea, and thought I would share what I did so far. To maybe be completed at a later date. First, here is a pic of the inspiration from FLW.

I sliced and sanded several species to a thickness to about an eighth of an inch. The gridwork is out of strips of walnut. Other woods are maple, Spanish cedar, purple heart, wenge, and cherry. The concept was to glue all the pieces to a sheet of Baltic birch and thickness sand it smooth. Then cut the female circles with a router into the glue-up and turn the male circle inlays on the lathe faceplate. Glue it again, surface sand again, and add the sides.

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Oh well, things happen, and dreams get placed on hold. At least I finally get the excuse to get a new saw.

Good luck to all the other entries,
Steve

There is a story behind the walnut endcap. It is from the Buck Hill ski resort in Minnesota, south of Minneapolis. I grew up across the street in Northfield from the woman who owned Buck Hill before it became a resort. In 1954 before she released it, she cut down some of the walnut trees, had them sliced up and stored them in her garage attic. When she passed away in the 70’s my Dad and I helped clean up her place and found a couple hundred board feet of it. My children’s crib and toy boxes are also made from it.

I made a handle for the front vise from an oak dowel and some cherry rings cut with a forstner bit and a hole saw on the drill press. Not sure I like it, but it works for now. Any suggestions?

So now I need to drill the dog holes. Any help on this? Should I run a double row for each vise, or what? Should I change the endvise’s chop to be wider and cover the entire width of the bench? If I run a double row for the endvise, it would put holes right down the middle of the bench.

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Thanks for looking,
Steve

I was working alone on the top, so I was unable to do the “glue up three and send a batch through the planer technique”. I just kept gluing one 4×4 to the next, waiting a half hour, and continuing. The only way to smooth it at the end was with a hand plane. It went way better than expected, probably because the plane arrived pre-sharpened.

I was just playing around with the face boards and clicked a pic. That is maple for the front and walnut for the end cap. I believe they will be trimmed to about 5 inches in width.

Making a mess using a router for the tongue for the end cap. Clamped a straight edge and routed from the top, flipped it over and repeated for the bottom side.

The new top after some clean up.

Take care,
Steve

I will give the top pieces a final jointing before the big glue up. I am dreading this glue up. I have not decided if I will try to do it in sections and then either thickness sand or thickness plane as I go, or just go for it. This stuff is gosh darn heavy. Maybe I need to grow up and hand plane it.

The plan is to add a 4/4 maple front and use 8/4 walnut for the end plates (because I have some of both) before I attach the vises. Bench dog holes will be drilled after it is all together. I also have a little 8/4 maple for the vise chops.

I am trying to keep the cost under $200.

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The 6 foot 8/4 for the top. Cut, jointed, and milled to thickness.

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The stretchers cut with tenons. These were resawed from 8/4. They are waiting for holes for the draw bore tenons, and for a bit of edge treatment.

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The two towers. Pretty much completed. Mortised and drilled for the stretchers. I cut the large mortises for the uprights with my CNC. That was fun. I cut the mortises for the stretchers with a hand held router, just because.

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The two vises purchased from Grizzly. Can’t beat the price. I hope they work out OK.

Comments or suggestions are very welcome.
Steve

“The Low Angle Smoothing Plane is based on the rare Stanley 164, and is essentially a shorter version of the Low Angle Jack Plane — with an adjustable mouth, and a massive 2” (5.08cm) wide, 3/16” (4.7mm) thick blade, set at 12°. However, this tool is only 9½” (24.1cm) long and weighs 3¾ lbs.

We call it a Smoothing Plane because of its size (the same as our No. 4 Smoother). But like the Jack, it excels at both rough and finish work, and can be converted from one mode to another very quickly. The unique overhead Bailey-type blade adjuster provides smooth depth adjustment at your fingertips.”

Here are some pics of the place:

Here are some returned planes being restored:

And here is their company store complete with wood and benches that allow you to try before you buy:

I am one happy jock. I’ll post a review once I have played with it some more.
Steve

I thought this would be a good time to explain some of the things that need to be decided, even for something this simple. Unlike hand routing, you actually have to state how fast and how deep to plunge, what the step-over or overlap is, and whether to climb or conventional cut.

So I chose: 1 inch per second feed rate, 1/2 inch per second plunge rate, 1/3 inch plunge per pass, 2 inch final depth, 40% step-over, and conventional. So routing a 2”x2.5”x2” mortise takes about 2.5 minutes each. I could push it faster, but it is actually removing quite a bit of wood even at this rate.

This is called Pocket routing, as opposed to Raster (carving), VCarve (signs), or Profile (cutting out) routing. I took off the dust skirt so you could see it work and hand held the vacuum.

Steve

I am trying to figure out how to complete it. The door is not attached. It is about an eighth of an inch thick. The plan was to glue a block to the inside top and bottom of the door and use finishing nails as hinge pins. The door was also supposed to have long iris type leaves jig sawn into it, but that is not going to happen. In fact, the door may just turn into a shelf do to time. In fact, it looks pretty good with out the door, and a shelf would be cool. Any suggestions?

So off to a final sanding, figure out the door/shelf dilemma, and then a few coats of oil.

Good to be back in the shop,
Steve

Jointed and resawed a bit. Then I sent them through my little Ryobi thickness planer. Even after letting it acclimate to the house for a week, once it was prepared, it still warped more than I would have thought. I had never resawed anything before as all I have is a craftsman bandsaw. But with a new large blade, it worked much nicer than I would have thought. You can see the bandsaw in the background.

I had never really used sliding dovetails for joints. They really lock into position. I like ‘em. I cut them with a little sliding jig on the router table. I thought that I better not use the CNC, as that might be a no-no for this contest.

I won’t be able to get any more done for a while as I ‘have to’ go spend next week in the Caribbean and escape winter.

Steve

I needed to address some of the problems that I noticed from before. Complexity needed to be reduced. Some of the racking and shifting needed to be addressed. I wanted to remove the concept of keeping all the skate bearings so tightly pressed against the rails. And it needed a face lift. So I came up with a new (is anything new?) design.

I kept the leadscrew and motor combination along with the torsion boxes. I got rid of the box below the gantry to let the bed lay flat on the table top. The sides were to lose the stiffeners by using a different strengthening technique. The wrap-around Y carriage was to turn into a flat plate. And I went with V-bearings for the linear rails. These bearings are actually fancier than they look. They have two rows of ball-bearings to be able to take both lateral and radial pressure.

They were to ride on angle iron as the official V-rails were beyond my pocket book.

I spent a fair amount of time trying to find a way to make the gantry wall stronger. I actually tested various plys and MDF combinations. I found out that 3/4 inch MDF skinned with laminate on both sides yielded a very strong panel. I also found that yellow glue was better than contact cement at holding it all tight. This combination actually makes a small torsion box, which is a substrate tightly coupled to skins on both sides. I edge banded them in maple to keep out moisture.

My gantry now looked like this:

I went with dual motors on the long axis to virtually eliminate any racking and more tightly couple the drive mechanism to the bearings. I used wooden standoffs to attach the motors.

The leadscrews where coupled to the anti-backlash nuts with wooden holders on each side of the gantry.

I attached the Y leadscrew to the carriage underneath the Y torsion box to get it out of the way.

I used the removable Z from the last machine and mounted it on this one.

And then added dust collection. A must needed addition.

It was all working pretty darn alright. But there were a few things that I decided to upgrade. The V-bearings for the Y carriage were digging into the edge of the angle iron. I solved this by adding a few wooden strips and mounted the angle iron with the angle facing up. This vastly improved its ride. I had also noticed that sometimes the steel rods and brass bushings for the Z were sticking, so I switched them over to V-bearings as well.

And finally I cut the plate across the front of the machine and added an end vise for vertical board routing.

To those who are still hanging in there: On a different note, before I had the money to buy a CAM program, I needed something to use for test cutting. So I wrote SpiroCNC. I think alcohol was also involved. It would generate G-code for spirographs and other geometric designs. It was kind of stupid fun and is still used a bit by people in that same situation. I did also use it to generate some rosettes.

Take care,
Steve