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Bench

6K views 6 replies 4 participants last post by  DavidHarms 
#1 ·
The idea and project start

This is going to be a small display bench to fill in a small wall between the dining room and living room. Not really designed to seat a person, more for display items (ie. my wife's dolls or bears, something along that line). I drew up the plan in Sketchup, it's going to be about 34" in height floor to top rail, about 26" wide and 13" deep. The seat will be hinged and a small compartment will be framed in under the seat. Have no idea what is to be stored there, but I am sure something will find it's way there.

I've modelled it after a deacon's bench.


So far I have all the pieces cut to rough size and the mortises on the sides cut. Started cutting the tenon shoulders tonight before I called it quits.
 
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#2 ·
Tenon's and first dry fit

With the rocking chairs out of the way I can now move on to items on my honey do list. Made some good progress yesterday. All the tenons on back rails and bottom aprons.


When I cut all the mortises I missed one. I roughed it our, but didn't finish cleaning it out (the one on the left in the picture

so I have one more mortise and tenon to fit. With that said I did a dry fit.



Thanks for reading
 
#3 ·
Today's progress & minor design changes

This project is coming along quite nicely. I am surprised how quick it's coming together :). Today I finished the mortise I forgot to clean out, finshed fitting the mortises and did another dry first. before continueing. Everything fit pretty well. So on to shaping the top rail. Did my layout and everything and was talking to my wife about the project, well lo and behold she has a little bit of an idea. She has some candle sticks with stars on them and she thought we should continue that theme to this bench. I found a picture of a decoration on a web site and printed it for the basic shape. Then laid that out in the center of the top rail. Here's the result after the first star is cut.

This is just a pic of the scroll saw.

The second star cut

And all of them cut with a little sanding. Not perfect, a few goof ups while cutting them out. Overall not too bad.

Once that was done it was on to cut the curve and sand it. Here's the result of that operation. It'll need a little bit more shaping once it comes out of clamps.

At this point I started sanding just to make life easier after assembly. I realize I made another slight goof. Actually kind of a big goof. I found at the bottom of one of the sides that there were some defects that looked pretty bad. Fortunately the defects were right in the middle of the side panel. Great, I can lighten the look of the side panel by making a semi-circle cut out to make "feet". I didn't get any pics of that unfortunately, but you can see in the clamp up pictures you can see the cut outs. Once the cuts were made I smoothed them out and went on to sanding. Next is glue up. Here's a couple of views of it all in clamps.





As always thanks for reading.
 
#4 ·
Ready to finish

Well here it is. Ready to finish. Didn't turn out quite the way I expected, had to make a couple of design modifications due to (no better way to put) being stupid and not taking 5 minutes to double check for square before quitting for the day. DOH! A simple clamp adjustment would have been all it took, but NO NO NO my mortises and tenons all looked nice and tight so I left it. So to makle a long story short the seat did not fit right and I had to make a modification. 1) moulding to hide the gap, 2) no compartment under the seat.

Lesson: to save kicking yourself in the a$$ later take a couple extra minutes to make sure. Good thing I'm not selling this one.

I'm almost too embarassed to post it, but here it is anyway.

By the time it's in the house and my wife has her bears on it, won't even notice it. But maybe I learned my lesson.

Thanks for looking.
 
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