A pair of Benches

These benches were designed to compliment the table I made last month – again made from Finnish White Oak, the same tree as for all of this series of projects.

The bent form was steam bend first, to relieve the stresses in the wood (it was splitting and breaking when bent cold for lamination), then after an hour or so, glue was applied to the laminations and clamped up over night – 4 pieces in total. the halves of the arch were joined with a simple lap joint, the glued and clamped together.

The compound Mortise and tennon joinery was undertaken using the Leigh FMT, which was a breeze, about an hour saw all the legs and rails finished and fitting perfectly first time (more luck than judgment I think) – the tennons on the arches were cut and trimmed by hand (this took some time, to get the angles just right).

The finish on the project is Polyx hard wax oil and Fiddes supreme wax.

I am not sure what is on the cards for next year with this customer, I still have about 150BF remaining from the tree, some 4”x4” 3”x3” 2 1/2”x12” all about 10’ long, most of what I have used so far was the smaller pieces and the not so nice pieces for the 4 projects to date – time will tell what will come next.

Here are a few more photographs

The legs and arches are pretty much identical on both benches. This photograph is of the two tops side by side

-- Tony - All things are possible, just some things are more difficult than others! - SKYPE: Heron2005 (http://www.poydatjatuolit.fi)