9/2/2015

On Friday afternoon I finally fitted the planing stops. It must be at least 3 months since the Ysterhout scraps were laminated. During the coarse of these months, I had several different ideas as to how the planing stops should be kept in place. In the end I simply went with a very tight friction fit. In other words, you take a mallet and bliksem (colloquial Afrikaans meaning many things, depending on the context, in this particular case ‘clobber’ comes to mind) them in and out of their little nest. So far it works like a charm, but I will report on how it turns out in the long run.

I decided to place the planing stops in front of the leg vise, rather than behind it as seen in most traditional benches. This shortens the bench surface available for planing, but also means that most of the planing can be done without having to lean over the leg vise. For longer boards I will eventually have a stop at the very end of the bench as well.

During the course of last week, I moved all my bench planes to their new address. You will notice that some of them have leather sleeping bags to stop them from collecting excessive woodworking debris. I am slowly stitching these by hand during weekends away from the shop.

The idea all along was to fit a traditional crochet to operate in tandem with the leg vise, but last week I saw this idea on another blog (unfortunately I can not remember which). I simply drilled four x 3/4″ holes in the side of the top beyond the leg vise. A simple Assegaai dog can now be used in the appropriate hole as a stop.

This weekend was actually the first opportunity to use my new bench properly. In the pictures below you can see how it assisted in an array of different ways to do bread-and-butter type operations. I am working on a sliding deadman for each side of the bench.

I wrote a separate post on this shop made beader, which you should find in the recent posts section. I added the beads to hide the laminated nature of the stock that makes up the deadman.

2/2/2015

On Friday afternoon I turned plugs for all the holes created in the bench top to attach hardware. They were then glued in overnight and worked flush to the top first thing on Saturday.

Initially I had plans to build quite elaborate sliding tool trays to occupy the space between the twin-top of my bench. After lots of thought I decided to first build very basic trays in order to get an idea of what I really need by using them for a while. This train of though produced these Masonite and Tasmanian Blackwood trays held together with 32 self-tapping and four traditional wood screws (each).

As you can see there are five trays in total. There are three that operate in the top groove and two in the bottom. They slide effortlessly to enable the bench user to be able to open up space when he/she would like to use F-style clamps through the split in the top. They also provide a very handy storage option for the bread and butter tools that are constantly used at the bench.

I made lids for the top three trays to prevent unwanted debris from nesting in them. The bottom two trays hide under the top ones, so they do not need lids. The top surface of the lids sit roughly 3 mm below the top of the bench, which creates a handy area to place tools that might want to roll off the bench. This is illustrated in the pictures by the Yankee screwdriver.

The building phase of this project had it’s first birthday on Sunday the 1st of February. I managed to apply the first coat of finish only hours before the celebrations. For this purpose I prepared a 1:1:1 mixture of Tung Oil, Mineral turpentine and diesel. From my reading it seems as if wood borer (which frequents this particular neck of the woods) loves beech, so I though the addition of some diesel might persuade them to seek alternative pastures. In the pictures you can see how it made the Kaapse Swarthout, Witpeer, Ysterhout and Assegaai come alive, while It gave the beech a very slight amber tinge. It was followed up on Sunday with a coat of Wooddock. You might notice that I did not apply any finish to the top as it still awaits it’s final flattening. The plans is to use a Tung Oil and Varnish mixture for the top. Please note that it might be useful not to sand between coats as it creates a grippy texture, which is desirable on a workbench.

November 2014

My final job towards finishing my bench for 2014 was to start building the twin screw vise jaw. I managed to prepare the two beech boards (pictured) by hand a month or so earlier. Thus it had quite some time to settle. Lie-Nielsen provide a very detailed pdf document on how to build the jaw that goes with their hardware. It took some work with the router, a glue-up and Bob’s your Uncle!

19/1/2015

I decided to take a few pictures to document the state of the bench prior to any work done for 2015.

2015 started off with some very tricky fitting work in order to get the twin screw vise fitted to the bench. The main reason for this is that I decided to drill holes in my 4″ bench top to accommodate the 2 ACME threaded rods, rather than to cut 2″ deep dados.

The Witpeer breadboard end had to be sawn off flush with the edge of the top before I could even start to fit the vise.

I did not take too many photos (during installation) as I was too busy swearing and struggling, but here are some pictures of the end result.

26/1/2015

This weekend I focused on getting the end vise finished.

Then I made the two handles for the other two vises, using Assegaai and Beech.

Here are my first shop made Assegaai bench dogs in action.