675 days ago
by Mike Lingenfelter |
13 comments »
Well I started the first step in building the Holtzapffel workbench. I went out last weekend and picked up some Douglas Fir for the bench and started to mill it up. I choose Douglas Fir for a couple reasons. First it was pretty cheap, I only spent about $150 on the lumber. Secondly, its a stable and stiff wood, which is good for a bench. It is also pretty hard for a “softwood”. I also used Douglas Fir on the small bench I built as a sharpening station. I like how it turned ...
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665 days ago
by Mike Lingenfelter |
11 comments »
This weekend I have a little time to work in the shop. I have plans for the next couple of weekends, so it might be a little while before I can work on the bench again.
Today, I cut all of the legs and stretchers to size and cut the tenons on the legs and stretchers.
The Legs
The stretchers
I also had time to start to hog out the mortises. The first step was to mark out the mortises. I just used a combination square and the stretchers themselves to layout the mortises. The str...
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737 days ago
by Olaf Gradin |
1 comment »
A fellow Holtzapffelian, Roger (here at Lumberjocks), is writing about his project regarding the same bench. He started out by purchasing his hardware for the bench and is now in the process of picking out his wood. That reminds me of a deliberation I’m going through with my own bench. What hardware to use?
The plans call for a quick-release end vise – nothing too fancy, I suppose. I want the Jörgensen version – I think it had a 12” maximum opening. The maximum...
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738 days ago
by Olaf Gradin |
6 comments »
My first big project will be the Holtzapffel cabinetmaker's workbench. If you’ve kept up with Christopher Schwarz, you already know well what I am talking about. It’s a beautiful machine, and I want to start my shop off with this cornerstone of hand tool work.
I’ve long sought after the European benches you see in the magazines, but the money put them well outside of my reach. Just as I was about to fold and build a modern design on the same, I found some articles rega...
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546 days ago
by kem |
7 comments »
I’ve done a lot of work on the top since the last entry. I started by roughly flattening the bottom side of the top. This was my first big opportunity to use my handplanes and I learned a lot from the experience.
First, this took a lot of time. Part of it was my own inefficiency. I started by going diagonally across the surface but it was so uneven that it was just riding on the high boards. A more efficient way to start with the roughness caused by an uneven glue up is to plane leng...
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559 days ago
by kem |
4 comments »
It’s been over 7 weeks since my last entry, but it took about that long for the wood to dry out enough. For the first 3 weeks, the wood was drying very slowly probably because it was still cold out here in Denver.
In the mean time, I spent some time adding dust collection to the shop and also built this sweet sawbench/sawhorse from Chris Schwarz's design.
This gave me some good practice milling up the lumber and also with some finishing. I used the natural Watco Danish oil on ...
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559 days ago
by kem |
4 comments »
I decided to start out with the legs, so I could get more practice milling the lumber and in gluing the pieces up before tackling the top. The idea with the legs is to sandwich a longer board in between two shorter boards to make a ready-made tenon.
Here are all of the pieces for the four legs milled up.
You can see some dark streaks in these pieces. Those are where I ran into sap pockets in the wood. I don’t know if that’s bad or not, but it is annoying.
I th...
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458 days ago
by Damian Penney |
17 comments »
So it’s been a long time since my last post, had a bit of down time where I went on vacation and did odds and ends but I’d been making slow and steady progress on the top.
I can’t believe how much trouble I had gluing a bunch of sticks together :) All my issues stemmed from the fact that I didn’t have a good way of surfacing such long pieces. My 6” jointer just wasn’t up to the task so I faffed around trying to do it other ways. I eventually used a huge ...
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738 days ago
by Olaf Gradin |
6 comments »
Last weekend I made my first trip to a local lumber yard for the Holtzapffel bench project. After much deliberation, I had made a firm decision on White Ash as my choice of wood. I’ve not been to many lumber yards, and I’ve never gone to pick out my own rough-cut slices before, so this was quite exciting for me. In my haste, I planned poorly for the hauling of big, heavy woods and had to rent a Home Depot truck for the duration. I drive a Mazda3 which, while Zoom-Zoom and util...
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626 days ago
by Damian Penney |
11 comments »
So I got my jointer blades back from the sharpener, Standard Saw Works, and they did a great job. It’s a cool store too and one of the storefront window displays is full of old wooden planes (I didn’t get a pic)
Once I got the blades back to the workshop I set about reinstalling them. My usual method is to use my dial indicator and twiddle with them for hours on end getting them just right but this time I tried a new approach which worked really well.
After I’d dropped...
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