The easy part’s over—all of the base components have been glued up, trued up, and evened up.
After gluing the pieces together to make the rough leg components, I squared up the surfaces with a hand plane, and then sent everything back through the thickness planer to insure uniform thickness. Then, it was time to cut everything to final length. I hate this part—it’s one of my favorite ways to mess up.
While the legs were a-gluing, I skip-planed the stock for the rails and stretchers. Since no glue-up was necessary here, I was mainly concerned with uniform thickness to make tenoning easier. I was now able to determine their final length since the leg thickness was now a known quantity, and cut accordingly (adding 2” on each end for the tenon!—anybody here ever forget that?).
As you can see, I went ahead and cut the short cheeks of my tenons. This will allow me to accurately mark to cut the length of the individual mortises. Of course, I’ll have to keep all the pieces organized from this point on.
Cleaning up the tenon cheeks gave me a chance to try out my new shoulder plane. Since I use the router table for my tenons, this was a necessary step made MUCH easier by Veritas’ ductile iron wonder tool. How I got by without one up till now is a mystery to me. I’ll be making a separate blog post to properly sing my praises of that little gem.
Now comes the hard part—28 mortise-and-tenon joints.
Guess I’d better get busy.
-- Robert from Raymond, MS. "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is therefore not a practice, but a habit." - Aristotle
7 comments so far
Karson
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25811 posts in 1299 days
posted 881 days ago
Nice looking so far.
-- What happens in the workshop stays in the workshop. No wait that doesn't sound right. Karson Southern Delaware karson_morrison@bigfoot.com †
David
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1982 posts in 1038 days
posted 881 days ago
Robert -
This is a great series! Looking awesome. Can’t wait to see the M & T joints – all 28!
-- http://foldingrule.blogspot.com
WayneC
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6060 posts in 996 days
posted 881 days ago
Great progress. Looking forward to seeing the assembly. Also very interested in the plane review. Been kicking around the idea of getting the large LN shoulder plane. I would be interested in your opinions on the Veritas.
-- We must guard our enthusiasm as we would our life - James Krenov
Bob Babcock
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1808 posts in 985 days
posted 881 days ago
Looking good! Can’t wait to see it finished. My “workbench” is a 30 year old B&D Workmate and a rickety old dining room table. This is going to be one of my 1st projects once I have a shop that can fit a decent bench. I would so love to have a nice sturdy bench.
-- Bob, Carver Massachusetts, Sawdust Maker http://www.capecodbaychallenge.org
oscorner
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4572 posts in 1210 days
posted 880 days ago
I’m looking for to your blog and the next steps in your bench making process.
-- Jesus is Lord!
snowdog
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808 posts in 881 days
posted 879 days ago
I am still new to all this hard work. I miss the 20 oz hammer and my framing gun <grin>. What is “skip-planed” really mean. I get the basic concept from a little web research but is there a simple description someone can point me to? Does it just mean roughly planed?
-- "so much to learn and so little time"..
TheGravedigger
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211 posts in 923 days
posted 851 days ago
Skip planing is a term used for the initial planing of wood down to basic dimensions. It removes surface abnormalities and makes sure all of the boards are the same basic thickness. Many people are surprised at the amount of variation between different boards from the same pile. Skip planing makes sure they’re all equal.
-- Robert from Raymond, MS. "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is therefore not a practice, but a habit." - Aristotle