21/9/2015

It gives me great pleasure to report that the bench was successfully glued up yesterday. Before I show you those pictures, let’s just look at the lead-up . In the pictures below you can see how the dowels finally came into being. I changed the cutter on the dowel cutter to a ¼” size and cut a short section at the end of each dowel to that size. This made it easy to fit the dowels in a cordless drill to do a quick bit of sanding.

The dowels had these burnished areas coming out of the no. 77.

A quick sanding made for a very smooth dowel.

They were then chopped to length …

… and pointed using the BPS.

The hand made dominos were shaped using this block plane.

I used an array of rasps, a spoke shave and a block plane to cut the stopped chamfers on the legs.

The Marx-Roubo bolts each received their own little slot, which will be covered up with wood in future.

I used a mortise chisel, Lie-Nielsen router plane and my new 1887 Disston backsaw for this operation.

The wife was so kind as to help me with the dry fit and the actual glue-up a day later.

Dry run finished.

On Sunday afternoon it was time for the glue-up. The three beams forming the top remained 3 mm apart to allow for wood movement. The are only linked by the (unglued) dominos to ensure that they line up flush and support each other.

Annamie looks like an evil Urologist about to examine a victim’s prostate.

As you can probably see I used slow setting epoxy, as the glue-up took more than an hour.

All the draw pins and wedges in place.

Just a reminder why I make such a fuss with wood movement in terms of my bench design. This is the ambient humidity and temperature for the past month or so. By mid rainy season it would be up around 75-80%.