workbench

Flattening the bench

I noticed while I was putting together my six board chest that it was wobbling on the bench. Uh oh .. need to flatten.

Unbeknownst to me, some one else was also flattening his French Robou Oak Bench yesterday.

Now my bench isn’t made of incredibly old oak cut from monster slabs. It’s a bunch of Douglas fir 2×4 laminated together and it’s pretty nice stuff. I haven’t had the problems with fir that Joe has had with his bench and fir and, based on his experience, I’m glad I got the nicer stuff. Anyway, I really like my bench even though its only got a 3 1/2″ top. But I have to admit, I wish I was going to WIA so I could see the FORB landing. 😀

Deadman complete

Back to the workbench! (yippee!) First the layout, of course.

After cutting the overall shape on the band saw, I used my newly installed leg vise to start the final shaping. First using the spoke shave to get out the unevenness created by the bandsaw blade.

There was a nasty knot right in the middle of both sides, but my small scraper did a really nice job of cleaning it up.

After that it was on to the rasp. (Commentary: I discovered rasps when I made a handsaw in Mike Wenzloff’s class and I’ve found them incredibly useful.)

The final product prior to pencil line removal.

The Gallery

Making the track for the sliding deadman

So I debated how to make the track that the bottom of the sliding deadman slides on. I decided to use my wooden foreplane with the strongly cambered blade to take down the thickness on one side and then try my hand at rip sawing the other side.

So fun with planes first!

I kept track of my progress with the bevel gauge.

Then I cleaned up any ruff patches with my small scraper after getting it to the final surface with my Jack plane.

Then I took off the knife edge with my jack plane and jointer fence. Way more fun that scary angled table saw blades.

Rabbets, rabbets, rabbets ..

I got the chance to add my shelves into the bottom of the workbench. The solid wood maple shelf pieces will sit on the ledger strips that I installed earlier. Each shelf piece has a rabbet on opposite side edges so that the pieces fit into one another.

After the rabbets are all done and some notching to fit the pieces around the legs, it looked like this. Maple is, to me anyway, surprisingly beautiful. I’m absolutely wanting to make more with maple.

The picture doesn’t do it justice.

In the meantime, Inspector Kitten assessed the cat toy potential of the maple shaving.

Base and ledger strip installed

I got a chance this week to installed the ledger strip around the base.

I used my skewed rabbet plane to make the grooves and cleaned it up with a chisel plane. The strip has a 1/2″ groove that’s about an 1/8″ deep. That fits snuggly into the groove cut into the stretchers.

I’ll be making the shelf next and then on to the deadman.