6/10/2014

I really do hope that this will be the last post that does not include a picture of the assembled bench. I am starting to get a bit worried that I might not be able to get it assembled before the major changes in humidity. To give you an idea, the ambient humidity in my shop change from around 25-30% in winter to 75-80% during the rainy season.

Here you can see how I fitted the legvise hardware to the leg that will play host to the mentioned vise.

The next task was to do some of the preparation work to eventually fit the breadboard-end. The rest of this process can only be done once the bench is assembled for the (hopefully) final dry run.

This piece of Ysterhout was processed as pictured to become the planing stops. You can also see how I marked out and chopped the holes in the top to accommodate them. My cousin, a Urologist from Cape Town, did the final tidying up of the two orifices. He seems to have a particular talent when it comes to an orifice.

While he was perambulating the two orifices, I started fitting the long stretchers to their legs.

Here I just finished excavations for the end vise to be fitted.

8/9/2014

At this stage it was back to the drill press to remove some waste from the mortises before butchering the rest away by means of a mortise chisel and mallet madness.

I used my Festool router to cut the dado in which the top of the deadman will slide. The same router were then employed to cut the dadoes in which the tool trays will slide between the two parts of the twin-top.

As per usual I flattened one side of the beech boards destined to become the twin screw vise chop with hand planes, removed the twist and finished the job off with the planer. They were then clamped to the assembly table and left to settle for a few days while I continue with other bits and pieces.

One such task is painting the Irwin quick release vise black as it’s traditional blue does not fit into my idea of je ne sais quoi.

24/8/2014

It was with more than a wee bit of apprehension that I partly assembled the bench for the first time. The reason being that I had to mark out the exact location of the shoulders of the long stretchers. The good news is it went together like a dream. The 18th century exposed joinery is bombproof, even without glue, draw pins and wedges. Once those are added it would be impossible to destroy during normal shop work. Here you can see how I clamped the long stretcher in position using two batons of equal length referencing off the underside of the top.

While the bench was semi assembled I used the opportunity to mark the location of the hole that will accept the 20 mm bolt to fix the top to the apron. I used my shop made Witels marking knife with it’s extra long blade.

I then used my tenon saw (as my carcass saw is simply too small) to cut the long stretcher’s tenon shoulders. The rip cuts were done on the bandsaw, because it was significantly beyond the capacity of my tenon saw.

I used my recently acquired Stanley #10 rabbet plane (ca 1910) to clean up the tenons as the bandsaw is not particularly accurate. You can see how the t-channel stops and dogs work in tandem to speed up work like this on my assembly table.

At the halve assembled bench I used a chisel and mallet to perfect the shoulders. You can see how the gap between the two parts of the twin-top acts as an ideal clamp gateway.

I followed the same process as with the tenons of the short stretchers and aprons, in dividing the tenons into three fingers. In this case the outside fingers will extend through the legs to be wedged for more strength.

Once this was done it was back to the bench to mark out the location of the mortises.

Here I used my Festool TS55 to cut the end off one part of the top where I need to install the metal quick release end vise.

At the opposite end of the bench the TS55 helped the start shaping tongue/pins that will fit into the Witpeer breadboard-end. I did the rest with an array of hand tools.

Here you can get an idea of what the bench will look like eventually.

I spent lots of time trying to work out exactly where to locate the dog holes in relation to all the other hardware. I decided on 1¾” from the front edge (as per Chris Schwarz advice) and 3″ centre to centre for the line of dogs working in tandem with the end vise. I added a plethora (in other words, most probably a major overkill) of dog holes that could be used with the twin screw vise, as you will see later.

Seeing that my bench top is a smidgen over 4″ thick, I decided to drill ¾” (deep) x 1″ (diameter) relief holes at the bottom of the top before drilling ¾” (diameter) dog holes from the top down.

This is a 30 mm (diameter) hole where the 20 mm bolt through the top and apron will be covered with a wooden plug.

I used this crappy Chinese contraption to drill the dog holes as close to 90° as possible. The last picture show the Witpeer breadboard-end on which I stood in order to drill the dog holes.

At this stage my plan is to make two planing stops that will fit through holes shaped as pictured below.

Marking out the long stretchers’ mortises.

In order to get the optimum dog hole layout and for it not to interfere with twin screw vise hardware I had to shorten the chain of the Lie-Nielsen vise ever so slightly. In the process I lost about 1″ capacity between the two vise screws. It went from 24″ to 23″.

At this stage I took the three beech boards which were acclimatizing in the shop roof down to process them into a leg vise chop, twin screw vise chop and a cover for the inside face of the quick release vise.

10/8/2014

I am very happy to report that I managed to fit two legs to the one part of the twin-top this weekend. The first was quite a mission, but the second not so much. One really needs a healthy dose of patience for this work and it does not help much that I am starting to feel pressured to get the bench assembled before the changes in ambient humidity (probably some time in November).

The second leg. You might notice the gaps on either side of the through tenon’s mortise that was created to accept wedges.

I inserted the apron and took these photos to give you an idea of the base structure of the bench.

A week ago I started to take the Irwin quick release vise (destined to become the end vise) apart in order to “paint it black”, as I am a Stones man.

3/8/2014

I started cutting the tongue and groove joints on these Kaapse Swarthout boards destined to become the shelve below the twin-top using my Lie-Nielsen tongue and groove plane. The first task however was to arrange the boards so that the edges would fit best in terms of colour and grain pattern. Once I felt please with the arrangement I marked the order using a carpenters triangle.

Once I started cutting the joinery, I realised that the boards were obviously thicker than ¾” (the thickness where this no. 48 plane centers on) which meant that another “tongue were left on the male edge of the joint. After taking one shaving I first drew a picture on a piece of paper (pictured) to work out how to fix this problem and realised that I simply had the remove the extra tongue with my #78 rabbet plane and all should be sweet.

As you can see here.

While all this were going on I liberated the Lie-Nielsen vise hardware from the safety of it’s packaging. Here you can see what it looks like.

On Saturday I started my next onslaught on the female parts of the leg-to-top joinery.

Luckily I had another look in Chris Schwarz’s book on building benches and saw that he actually make reference to the fact that one needs to remove the blade adjuster from our router plane to reach this depth. It meant that I could use this very useful tool to clean out the majority of the through dovetail dado (for lack of a better term), before using that flat surface as a reference to guide my chisel while removing the rest by horizontal pairing.

Here are two closeups of the router plane with the depth stop and blade adjuster removed.

I then took to the long stretchers with my shop made scrub plane to remove the excess timber from the strips I laminated on last week.