My Workbench Project Blog
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- This topic has 81 replies, 13 voices, and was last updated 5 years, 7 months ago by Hugo Notti.
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@hugonotti
Thank you for your detailed descriptions – not only the progress, but also – and in my humble opinion more important – the difficulties you ran into. It is very helpful, in particular that you mentioned the amount of loss in thickness. So I came to the conclusion that I’ve bought not enough wood for my bench…Fingers crossed that your effort pays off.
E.
29 June 2017 at 10:07 pm #313347Hello….. Yes! It’s me – in person, the guy, who originally wondered, why some people take so long to finish their work-benches! I had a few days off and last week-end, when I got bored, I remembered this very important project, that I had sort of pushed out of my mind for a while.
So I put two saw-horses on my balcony, dropped one of the bench-top slabs on it and attacked the legs again. Guess what: It took me about one hour to get them done. I am not sure, what was different, I didn’t plane much in the meantime, the parts were just as unflat as I left them about three months(!) ago, and I had no alien visitor pimping up my skills… I think, I was successfull for three reasons: I was relaxed, the previous frustration was forgotten and I had real good light (sunlight). Then I proceeded carefully, first checking with straight edge, winding sticks and the sole of my plane, I eye-balled the corners too, and miraculously, I understood, what to do…
So the other two legs are laminated now, see pictures attached. The glue-lines look fine, the outside is another challenge, because the glued surfaces aren’t parallel to the outsides of course. But I have straight glue-lines for reference, and I think, I can be a bit sloppy wherever I don’t need to fit the rails. Apart from that, my legs were a bit on the large side, and now they will be quite appropriate in thickness 😀
And now I see, that finally my “last post” has appeared as well. It has mentioned a few projects that I want to describe on this forum too, being archery from an amateur-woodworkers view. But that will appear in another thread.
Ecky H., thanks to your post! I am happy to see, that my idea to strip naked with most of my imperfections made sense. Many people say, that you have to make your own mistakes in order to learn, some people claim, that the clever ones learn from mistakes of others. But I think, many mistakes have to be made in order to learn, but it is very helpful to see, how other people struggle with the same problems and eventually succeed (or sometimes not).
Dieter
PS: I clamped both pairs together, so the big line in the center is formed by the original bevelled corners.
Attachments:
You must be logged in to view attached files.18 July 2017 at 9:56 pm #313834More delay, because I am so active in other fields and I wont’t rush things again (which was probably the main cause for my trouble with the leg laminations). But I think, once again, that the hardest parts are done now. There is still the flattening of the bench-top, but I am quite used to spruce now, and flattening the underside wasn’t that hard after all. The top will be just a bit more tricky, because I want both halves level. My largest concern is to get good reference faces onto the laminated legs.
I hope to be back with news in two weeks.
Dieter
I have just read through the entire blog post and honestly i’m disappointed that there’s been no further (posted) progress in so long. Did you ever get it completed? I was impressed by your resilience, I would have lost my temper long ago! on a side note; what ever happened to the tankard you made, i cant seem to remember.
16 January 2018 at 9:39 pm #440515Hi cwhite!
Thanks for asking! My enthusiasm got killed by my maintenance skills on the plane. I fiddled around quite a bit and in the end, I lost confidence completely. Then I also had my new hobby, archery, which I really enjoy. It basically took away all the time I would have needed to complete the workbench. There were quite a few small projects, but nothing close to the level of woodworking, that is discussed in this forum (archery target stands, arrow rack, wall-rack to store bows etc.). So I had nothing to report.
However, there is hope! I never completely abandonned the project, every piece is still in my workshop and in quite good condition. And I have started another project, a rack for my basement. It won’t be any high-quality work, just to the point, basement-quality, and made entirely from scrapwood. And that is the point, I have planed every visible surface of the boards, because they were very raw. This restored my confidence, and I actually used one of the slabs of my workbench to be, to work on. By the way, I was astonished about the variety of possibilities to secure wood without a vise! Perhaps this is worth another post on this forum.
There is no schedule yet, but I will be back!
Dieter
PS: I should re-read this topic eventually, to get back into the subject…
Hi hugo
If it’s of any condolence, i too had trouble planing, always out of square, twisted etc. For some reason one day I realised that it wasn’t happening anymore. It was like a switch – i still dont know what changed. I look forward to seeing you back at it
20 January 2018 at 12:55 pm #445690Today, I tried one leg again, hopefully the one with the smallest measurements, got one face flat and marked it clearly. From there I will get to the other faces and adjust the other legs accordingly. I think, I can use the first leg as reference for the heel of the plane to flatten the other ones. The main trouble is, that the wood is really tough to cut into. It will be tedious work to get form the outside to the inside, while removing lots of small high spots.
As for getting better, I think, it is the way you look at things. The better you can see the effect of every single stroke of the plane, the better you can adjust. I realised that, while planing the boards for my rack.
Dieter
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