Workbench #3: Base and sundries

Ok, back to blogging. The next picture is me using the top on sawhorses in its first job as a workbench. I needed a good surface to clamp the legs to in order to scrape them even with the scrapers that are on the right in the picture. Who woulda thunk that flat pieces of metal like card scrapers would be useful with just a slight burr on them? I love things like that that are low tech and do a better job then all our fancy other gidgets and gadgets. Don’t get me wrong, I love my gadgets and fancy powerful things, but it does give me some sort of primeval pleasure in using a simple scraper to get something done.

In the next two photos, I have marked out the mortises for the stretchers and you can see the preformed mortises in the feet and bench supports for the preformed tenons on the legs.

Those mortises in the legs had to be hogged out, and I sure wasn’t comfortable doing the whole mortise with my skills and the not so great Irwin chisels I had, so I hogged out the waste with my drill press and a Forstner bit.

The next shot is of one of my chisels sticking out of the mortise as I am squaring it up. I know I have said a few times that I don’t really like these chisels, but only for the reason that I ended up purchasing a set of Ashley Iles chisels for myself as a Christmas present and boy are they so much nicer. It may also have helped that I got a Worksharp shortly after and my chisels (all of them, including the Irwins) are so much sharper that they all cut better.

Here are the Ashley Iles Chisels. So nice and comfortable for my large hands and I love the weight and they cut like a dream.

Here the legs are being dryfit. If you look really close at the connection between leg and feet and support, you can see that the tenons were just a little long and that there is a slight gap. This was intended so that I could flush trim them later and be sure I had not made a measuring error. The next photo after that is the feet after they had been rounded over and had the relief cut on the bottom.

Oops, now I realize that I didn’t take any pictures while gluing up the leg sections, but you can take it from me that I glued them together. The next and last picture for this installment will be the glue up of the base. Since I have a dearth of clamps that are over four feet long (let’s just say that I have Zero), I had to do some creative clamping with my long boys both on top and bottom to make sure that everything was square.

That should just about do it for this post. On to the benchtop in a couple of days.

Ciao!