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.

21/7/2014

This weekend I started doing further work on the long stretchers, which included final hand planing of the swarthout cleats you’ve met before. In the pictures below you can see how my shop made winding sticks came in handy.

Between working on the stretchers I got so tired of drilling out waste with the brace and bit that I decided to giving the electric drill a go using a spade bit. I first set the drill to it’s slowest (and therefore strongest) speed and realised that it actually made short work of the waste removal. The drill did not even heat up at all, but never the less I did the drilling in many short bursts between other work. Of coarse the downside was that I realised how much religious baggage I still carry, as a peculiar guilt fell over me when the electric drill completed the job I started with the brace and bit.  Luckily it did not manage to get much of a hold on me before moving on to other hand tool work.

My shop made panel gauge again came in handy to mark out the area on the inside of the long stretchers where I had to remove some Witpeer to accommodate the cleat. I removed the bulk of it with my Festool router and tidied up the mess left with a Stanley no 78 rabbet plane and my shop made shoulder plane. These tools leave a much better finish and enables you to dial in slowly to the absolute exact size of the rabbit needed.

The next rabbit is meant to accept the endgrain of Kaapse Swarthout boards sitting diagonally on top of the cleat to form the shelve. I used the same sequence of tools used.

While all this was going on I set up the second part of the twin-top in order to saw and chisel out the sliding dovetail dados. You will notice that I used the cleats temporarily as braces for the Darwinian saw horse as they were a bit wobbly when I did the same to the other part of the twin top. It made a massive difference.

Once again the Festool Domino enabled me to line the additional strip of Witpeer up perfectly with during the lamination process. As per usual, I used the Proletarian sanding contrivances to get rid of machine marks on the glue surfaces.

14/7/2014

This weekend I finally managed to do the last massaging work needed to fit the short aprons and stretchers to their respective legs. You can see how well it all came together. Thank you David Charlesworth for all the tips in those DVDs that made it possible for a novice to get it done like this. As you can see I added quite a few layers of leather to one face of my heavy dead blow mallet during the previous week in order not to damage the work while tapping these gargantuan tenons home. Once assembled I positioned the legs on the two parts of the twin-top for marking out the through tenons and sliding dovetails.

I consulted the installation instructions of the Lie-Nielsen twin screw vise to make sure that the position of the legs does not interfere the positioning of the vise. Of coarse I did not keep track of the fact that the table was now upside down and that I needed to consider this when placing the legs and twin screw vise. After I did all the careful marking out and stood back, it dawned upon me that my twin screw face vise would end up on the right hand side of the bench once it is flip over onto it’s legs. Bugger!! So I had to start all over, but still prefer this to not realising and stuffing up the bench completely.

Once the various areas were marked out for the second time, I carefully transferred it to the opposite side and clearly indicated the waste to be removed.

In order to have a slightly more stable top beam to work on I clamped the two part of the top (first picture) together with two pipe clamps. Then I used my Lie-Nielsen tenon saw to cut the sides of the sliding dovetail dado (not sure if this is the correct terminology, but I am sure the pictures will make it clear). The pictures show the sequence of cuts I made in the waste area.

The chisel did the rest as you can see.

I thought I could use my Lie-Nielsen router plane to clean out the bottom of the sliding dovetail dados but it did not have the required reach.

Drilling out the waste from the mortises had to be done by hand as a 1″ drill in a handheld drill would surely destroy the motor in no time. This was thus the first job ever for my new purchased no 923 10″ Stanley brace. It is such hard going that I had to engage the ratchet mechanism to allow me to pull only, rather than trying to go through the full 360º, which is simply beyond my strength.