9/3/2015

My first version of Ron Herman’s saw bench were assembled this weekend. I decided to finish one (of the two) in order to hopefully learn something and use that knowledge to make small improvements to the second.

This is the tenon on the end of the apron. It is a through tenon that will be wedged.

The stretchers has a type of halve-lap dovetail (for lack of a better term) design as you can see. You will also notice that I decided to reinforce all the joints with slotted wood screws.

I added these strips of beech to the bottom of the top for two reasons: 1) to add strength, 2) to improve the grip of a holdfast due to the increased thickness of the top.

The same goes for the strips added to the end boards. You can also appreciate how I shaped the feet, which is one of the slight tweaks I made to the design.

Another one of those (tweaks) was to add an elongated hole in the middle of the top to act as a handle then one wants to move the bench using one hand only. The plan is to add two similar holes to the end boards to grip while moving it with both hands. I used slow setting epoxy as my adhesive of choice given that the bench was assembled in one go (that took me 1 hour). The extended open time is essential for this purpose. One of the advantages of adding the screws was that I needed no clamps at all.

Hopefully the bench will be finished in the next few days.