3/8/2015

I really like my hand planes, but if I do not see them for the next few months it will be a blessing of note. After almost a month of hand planing these freaking beams for the top of the bench, I am sooooo over planing it is not funny. In the pictures below you can see the final phase of planing, which happened over the weekend.

After establishing a reference edge, I used my shop made panel gauge to mark out the opposite edge.

I used a Stanley no. 9½ block plane to create a bevel to prevent splitting of fibers while working crossgrain.

The bevel enabled me to take quite aggressive crossgrain  cuts with my scrub plane to get rid of the bulk of the waste. That was of course followed by a truck load of longitudinal planing with a fore plane followed by a jointer plane.

Here they are after a month worth of removing nails, scrubbing away sand and bits of stone that got entrenched in the timber and planing. I include a few before photos to make me feel better about the ridiculous effort.

… and after.

Finally I was able to move on to marking out the location of the mortises for the legs. Before settling on a location, I moved the legs up and down with consideration for the length of the long stretchers (pictured) to ensure that they end up away from any knots. You will notice that the legs are still over-long, they will get shortened at a later stage.

Before the final marking out the legs were clamped with their aprons to mimic the exact position once glued up.

A glass of Whiskey to celebrate the end of another long day in the shop.

I decided to drill out halve of one of the mortises, just to do a non-planing activity before the end of the weekend.