14/9/2015

As the bench is approaching it’s glue-up stage, it is as if my toil has taken on a new verve characterised by a strange mixture of pep and angst. At this stage I plan to get it assembled in the next couple of weeks.

The pictures below should  suffice as an explanation of how I created the custom bolts, which will fix the top beams to the apron in conjunction with the Roubo joinery. As you can see, it is made up of galvanised 20 mm threaded rod and scrap mild steel rod forming a T. The ends of the T-piece is bent downwards ever so slightly to ensure that the custom hardware exert pressure across it’s entire length once properly fastened. We will call this the … wait for it … Marx-Roubo Bolt.

The idea is that the top of the T will be embedded/entrenched (and covered up with wood) crossgrain in the top, which will prevent it from rotating when it needs tightening due to possible seasonal movement of the wood. It also provides quite a wide area across which it exerts downward pressure to keep the top beam tight against the apron.

A task that I though would take me 30 min has been dragging on for the past week. I thought that my Stanley no 77 dowel machine  equipped with a ½” cutter would make short work of the 24 dowels (½” x 6″) I need for the bench. It turns out that perfectly straight grained Assegaai (Curtisia dentata) tends to fight the machine all the way.

I chose Assegaai as it is very hard, yet extremely flexible and does not move much at all once dry. The problem is that even with a very sharp blade it is hard work to make the dowels. On the upside, it is absolutely perfect dowel that emanate from the no. 77’s hind side (third picture). I will post some more pictures once the dowels are finished.

As you can see the kids also got stuck in once my arm was completely moer-toe.

By the way, this is the stock I prepared for the no. 77. It is perfectly straight grained Assegaai pointed using the legendary new tool in my shop known as the BPS (Boorish Pencil Sharpener).

Due to the extreme exertion inflicted by the dowel making activities, I had to come up with ample “legitimate” reasons to take a break. One of those was to check whether I prepared enough Without to span the entire length of the shelve below the bench.

OK, so I have enough Without, … now what? Back to the Dowel machine? Eish!!, … maybe not just yet. How about fitting the last set of stretcher tenons? That sounds better.

These beautiful girls assisted me to do just that.

The legs were finally cut to length using my Disston no. 12 crosscut saw. It is without a doubt one of my favourite tools and probably one of the best that was ever made.

While all this was happening, my son Didi got stuck into making the Dominos we need. It was very good practice to hone his sawing skills.

This is what a bench looks like where several different jobs are being done at the same time. I like jumping from task to task and have different stations set up for each. This way I do not get bored or tired doing one thing for too long. It works well for me, especially when there are tasks that necessitates serious stamina, like drilling a gazillion dog holes with a bit and brace, hand sawing 4″ x 5″ legs to length, creating dowels from Assegaai by hand etc, etc. The down side is of course that you need more workspace.

I am interested to hear what others think of this type of approach.

Here I am using the ½” bradpoint bit to mark out the middle of the draw pin (Assegaai dowel) on the tenons. Once I know that location it is fairly easy to mark out the required offset for the hole through the tenon.

7/9/2015

I managed to do a little bit of work during the evenings last week. One of those tasks were to add two strips of Meranti to the sides of the bench top’s centre beam. These strips comes from a doorframe. A friend of mine Anton Nel, rocked up at my shop a few weeks ago with this doorframe. He is a builder and was working on a house just around the corner from us. The so called carpenter on the site, arrived (as is exceedingly common around these parts) without any tools of his own. He needed to remove about 20 mm from each side of the 80 mm thick frame.

My table saw struggled as it is not made for this dimension of cut, so we decided to cut a 20 mm deep groove from both ends as a guide. We then used my monster 26″ Disston no. 12 rip saw to remove the timber between the grooves. Two cuts of 2 meters each had us both sweating like a gypsy with a mortgage.

It was these offcuts that I planed down to 15 mm (thickness), before gluing and screwing it to the sides of the beam. The idea behind the addition of these strips is to close the gap between the three beams that make up the top to only 3 mm. This will be enough to allow for wood movement, but small enough to prevent most things from accidentally falling through.

In the second and third picture below you can also see the slots I made with my Festool Domino. The three beams making up the top will have several dominos between them to help them to keep each other flush and straight. They will not be glued to allow free movement (horizontal), while only restricting movement in one dimension (vertical).

I used my 10 mm bit to cut the Domino slots. Unfortunately I do not have any 10 mm Dominos so I planed some Witpeer down to the desired dimension. Come to think of it, the standard Dominos would have been too short anyway as these will be breaching an 18 mm gap underneath the Meranti strips, extend 28 mm into one beam and 24 mm into the other. The slots are 28 mm deep in both beams, so the extra 4 mm allows for wood movement. In other words, I need to cut my home made Dominos at 68 mm (in length).

Here you can see how I am progressing with the row of dog/holdfast holes along the front edge of the bench. They are not perfectly in line as the marked difference in hardness between early and late wood cause the auger bit to follow the softer stuff, but I am not overly fussed by this. One could overcome this problem by building a jig, but for this bench it should be fine with the slight meandering of the row.

I spent most of my shop time this weekend on fitting the stretchers to their mortices. In the picture below, you can see how my chopping station is on one side of the bench and a station to shave the tenons down on the opposite side. I find it to be a very convenient setup and once again all those dog/holdfast holes come in handy. Monsieur Schwarz might have a heart attack, but he asked to be disobeyed.

For each leg, I first fitted the long stretcher.

In this picture you can see how handy the gap between the split top of my bench can be when fitting through tenons.

Once the long stretcher’s tenon was in place, I marked out the exact location of the “mortice” that will allow part of the short stretcher’s tenon to run through it.

Next up, the short stretcher being fitted in the absence of the long stretcher.

This picture illustrates nicely how the one tenon pass through the other. As I stated in an earlier post, this is a slight variation to the joinery used in my first bench that was inspired by Japanese joinery.

When fitting massive joints this precise (like a piston, as my friend Jonathan would say), it can be tricky to disassemble them. The picture below illustrate how useful my sliding-deadman-cum-leg-vise proofed to be in this regard. It kept the leg in position at the side of the bench, which allowed me to use both hands to carefully tap the tenon out with a mallet and a small off-cut.

Once that was done I could check whether both stretchers fit simultaneously.

At this stage I started to prepare timber for the shelve between the stretchers. I found two Without (Ilex mitis aka Cape Holly/African Holly) boards in my collect that I thought would go very well with the Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris).

Another reason for this choice concerns the fact that I have not worked with this species before. I am consciously trying to use all the different species in my collection during the shop-setup phase of my journey, in order to get a feel for each. Hopefully by the time I start building furniture it will enable me to make smarter choices.

This is a picture from the internet to show what it looks like once planed and sanded.

The next few pictures should be a reminder to all of you out there who can walk into a lumber yard and pic from hundreds of perfect boards that is ready to use. I have to do a whole heap of work to liberate decent bits of wood from these feral planks. You might be able to see how I marked out the useable areas.

My Disston no. 12 crosscut handsaw took care of all the crosscuts, while the bandsaw made short work of the rip cuts. I decided to keep the shelve’s boards at different widths to waste as little timber as possible and there seems to be a certain je ne sais quoi about the utilitarian appearance it creates.

As I said, at least there is minimal wastage this way.