The Holtzapffel Project #4: My first laminations

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 think this is my second or third attempt at laminating. My first attempt was a big gluey mess. I used way too much glue and the pieces slid all over the place as I clamped them down. This shot was taken after some clean up. I waited about an hour after clamping and came back with the crappy plane iron that came with my Stanley block plane. It works great for popping off the beads of squeeze-out.

I used all my Bessey clamps for a pair of legs. It’s kind of crazy using 24” and 40” clamps for something that’s under 4 inches thick. After this, I ordered the Jet 12” clamps. This is probably clamping overkill but since the jaws didn’t reach all the way across the 5 inch wide legs, I wanted to clamp on both sides.

After these dried, I cleaned up the edges with the jointer. That’s when this happened:

This little piece got chipped out. Luckily, I found it on the floor and I can glue it back in later.

Here are the laminated and jointed legs:

One of the legs has non-square sides, so I’ll have to go back and clean that one up. I also think the legs are going to be too tall for me. I’m going to cut them down about an inch. There’s still quite a bit of work to do on these legs: chamfering, smoothing, mortising, and drilling dog holes. But it’s time to move on to the top. Those are the boards for the top underneath the legs. More on that next time!

-- Kevin