Piano Bench #1: Design

Well, I might as well give this whole blog thing a try.

I’ve been having a hard time picking my next project. I have so many things I could make, but really nothing pressing. There is a large “honey-do” list, so I asked the wife what I should make next. She said “piano bench”.

Our neighbors gave us their upright piano a couple years ago, but they didn’t give us a bench.

Once again, I’m going to use this as practice for furniture building. (I wonder when I’m going to stop saying that . . . won’t all my projects be practice really??)

So on to the design. My last project was a very simple, quick (square) sofa table

For this bench I wanted to start getting “curvy”. So on to Sketchup. I’m trying to improve my Sketchup abilities as well as my woodworking ones.

Here’s a view of what I came up with. I was thinking of making it with Mahogany to start with (I’m not even going to try to match the existing piano, so I figured I’d pick a new wood to work with)

Then I was thinking I should try cherry and maple since I have some maple in the shop:

And then looking at it for a little while, I got a crazy idea . . . what if I made the top to look like piano keys?? Hmmmmmmm??? . . . .

I’m thinking I can do a glue up of maple, with thin strips of walnut for “key separators”, and then inlay some 1/8” cherry for the sharp keys. The only thing I’m a bit unsure of is if wood movement would be a problem with the inlayed keys.

So that’s where I am now. Up next, the joinery . . .