Mini bench: part 2

I left off last time having cut the half-lap joints. Now I wanted to glue them together and pin them. I'm still not sure what, if any, benefit I'll get from pinning, but since the floor of the half-lap joint is so rough from the pine lumber's propensity for splintering, it will give me an extra piece of mind.

As I often do, I first made a template to work off of.

I just used the width of my ruler to figure out where to place the holes from the top and bottom edge, and just placed them an inch in from each side. It seemed a good enough placement.

I drilled the holes.

Then I used the template and drilled the holes, glued up the boards and drove 5/16" dowels through. I could have made my own square or octagonal pins, which I've done before, but one of the guiding principles of this project is quick and dirty, so pre-made dowels is it. I tested one before hand and the dowels were actually quite respectable in terms of roundness and fit into the hole, so they were fine for this use. (though I would still love to have a dowel plate)

After the glue dried and I cut off the pins with my new flush-cut saw (Happy Birthday!) I started to plane down the surfaces to get a nice fit and take off some of the marks that had accumulated from the various operations.

This is where the leg vise really showed its stuff. I was able to clamp up the leg assembly and hold it both at the top and bottom of the leg vise.

Once I figured out where to place the pin in the parallel guide, that sucker held the leg assembly like it was an act of God. I could have been chiseling out mortises, or cutting the very end and it would have held it perfectly still. I really like my leg vise.

As it was, I was merely planing down the edges, and then used the wagon vise to do the faces. Edge, face and ends, that's what you need to be able to do, right Mr. Schwarz?

Overall my bench works beautifully. I do need to get my sliding deadman in place for my next project as I'll be making a longer table top, but for this small project, it couldn't have been better.

After finishing the planing I just set the mini bench on top of my own with the top just sitting on the legs. Now the top of the legs will be mortised into the top, so it will sit further down onto the cross piece.

As you can see, the joints are tight, but not terribly pretty. That's what happens when you go fast using cheap wood.

After putting it together like this, I decided that I need to make it a little wider. The proportions weren't quite right, and I think it will be more useful for what he does, which is mainly whacking on wood and storing his (one) tool on his bench. (his hammer) I'm also seriously considering flipping the legs upside down and putting the stretcher across the bottom. We'll see where I go with this next time.

Workshop Crawl and Wood Purchase

Went on the workshop crawl with the North Carolina Woodworker group. It was a lot of fun meeting in the flesh those with whom I've already met virtually. And we got to see six interesting shops with some very different approaches, work and methods.

My favorite, because it speaks to the way I work, was John's shop. After an episode of Fun With Tablesaw Kickback, John discovered the joy of hand work. He has turned his garage into quite an amazing workshop.

From the very Schwarzian saw bench:

to the massive logs lying around for riving (Peter's name was mentioned a time or two)

to the very nicely executed Roubo

it was definitely a shop after my own heart.

But what was really extraordinary, as you can get a hint from what was on the workbench, is the extra tool he built in order to make the posts of the bed he is building. You see one lying on the workbench,

but another is still in process.

Yes, that's a seven foot spring pole lathe. He did an amazing job of building it and it seemed to work quite well.

Overall, a very fun day.

I did leave the crawl with more than pictures. I picked up a couple of pieces of wood for very reasonable prices.

I don't have a lot of wood beyond some left over pieces of maple from the workbench, and some dimensional borg stuff, so there's not much of a wood cache to pick from. Which is ok since I'm not able to do much work anyway. But I couldn't resist these two pieces.

One is Sapele. It is 4/4 rough sawn, a little over 10" across and almost exactly 6' long. What really attracted me to it was the figure and the price.

Even with the lousy light in my shop last night and with it still being pretty rough sawn (I took the top most fuzz off with a few passes of a plane, but it's still pretty rough) you can still see the grain popping out.

One for scale on my five-foot bench (didn't even try to correct the horrible light)

And one with a flash.

This one I'm going to have to think long and hard how I want to use it.

The other board I picked up (with great difficulty, if truth be told) is a rather large piece of quarter-sawn red oak. It's about 17 inches wide, by 90 inches long. It's 5/4 rough sawn, and like the sapele, even rough sawn the grain pattern pops right through.

Here's one side:

And for a real close-up

And the other side:

And to get an idea of scale in my shop:

And here with a one-foot ruler:

The rays and flakes are more pronounced along one edge of the board and extend about half-way in. I'll have to think about how to use this. I didn't get a pair of bookmatched boards from the same tree as this piece and about the same size. I may regret not having the option of making a two-board, quarter-sawn oak table.

Regardless, it's fun to have some wood around for inspiration. Another step further along in my evolution.

Wagon Vise

A commenter asked about the wagon vise. Since I think it's a great addition to my bench, I thought I'd share a few thoughts about it.

The general concept is an old one, and I first encountered it from first Chris Schwarz's blog over at Woodworking Magazine (see blog roll on left), and then again in his workbench book. (which you should buy, right now. Go ahead, I'll wait......Back again? good)

The details of execution I came up with myself. I didn't want to do a bench bottom installation, and I thought, since I was designing this from scratch, and could incorporate it any way I wanted, I'd design it to be built-in to the bench itself. This allowed me to keep the design very simple, which is a benefit for an amateur like me.

The essential design is a block of wood (the chop) attached to the end of a small bench screw. The screw is fixed at the end of the bench, and the chop slides along a pair of grooves cut into the faces of the adjoining boards.

My top is made up of a series of 7/8 thick boards glued together. Board 1 is at the front of the bench where I stand, and board 14 is at the back. Board 1 is full length. Board 2 and 3 are short, thus creating the gap for the wagon vise. Board 4 is full length. There is a groove cut into the inside faces of boards 1 and 4 down which the chop moves. At the end of boards 2 and 3 is a block through which the screw passes and into which I inset the nut of the screw. This block is just glued face-t0-face with boards 1 and 4.

Here's a bad copy of the Visio drawing I made of it.

Update: I realized the I forgot to point out that my original drawing had the vise only one board wide, but when I got past measurements, and got to the real objects, I realized that I needed to make it two-boards wide. You must always be ready to change design in the face of reality. At least those of us as bad at design as I am.

Here's a photo of it installed. You can see the groove and the tabs on the chop that slide in the groove. You'll notice that I made the chop so the grain went the opposite direction of the bench top. I did this because I had to laminate the chop together to encase the pad of the bench screw.

Perhaps this is a good time to revisit how I built it. (you can read my account at the time in an earlier post)

First the chop. I had to make this several times as I kept learning and screwing up the layout dimensions. I also started to go down the path of a half-dovetail design for the tabs and groove, but realized what a total pain that was going to be to cut in the hard maple. So I went with square, which works just fine.

First I cut out the three pieces and then ganged them together to cut the tabs.

Now, this is what the screw looks like.

It's a press screw for book presses or cider presses. The pad on the end has no built-in means of affixing it to a chop. I decided I didn't want to drill holes in it since I wasn't sure how all of this would work, and if I'd need to change the screw, and if the holes would weaken the already small pad. So I designed a means to encase the pad in the chop in such a way that i could take it out if necessary.

Here's the back-most layer of the chop. The keyhole shape is to allow the collar of the pad to stick through, and the slot in the bottom allows access to the bolt that holds the pad to the screw.

The middle layer of the chop I cut out a recess to accommodate the pad.

It was at about this point that I decided not to make the pad removable. I still needed access to the bolt to affix the pad to the screw, but I left the recess for the pad in the second layer just big enough for the pad. I then glued it all up.

Here it is all glued up and ready for mounting.

Here it is with the screw installed. The piece of scrap you see shows my initial thoughts on a half-dovetail design for the tabs.

The dog hole in the chop goes towards the end.

After that, it was time for the grooves.

After careful layout, and a lot of trying out prototypes (both of the design, and the technique to make such big stopped grooves), I cut the grooves. The grooves are about 1" wide and about 1/2" deep. All I had was a 1/2" pigsticker mortise chisel, a great big mallet and ear protection.

Here you can see how the chop slides in the grooves.

Making the block at the end that holds the nut for the screw was also a bit of a challenge, mainly because drilling out a large enough hole through end grain of hard maple is not a fun thing. I tried a bunch of different ways with what tools I had and ended up doing the e pluribus unum technique, "out of many holes, one" approach.

You'll notice the final hole is not exactly round, but not as distorted as it appears in the last picture. But it was good enough.

I tested it for length. (I learned, the hard way, to leave the boards all a little too long on one end and cut them off at the end rather than try and cut them all to perfect dimensions. There are no perfect dimensions)

And in the end, after gluing up, screwing up the glue-up and having to reglue (read back a bit in the blog for all the fun), I ended up with a great little wagon vise. It seems small, but it really holds quite well. I could pick up my bench, if I was strong enough, by a handle squeezed in my wagon vise. And I ended up using mainly wooden bench dogs made out of lengths of dowel with a little ball catch inset into the side to make sure the ill-fitting, cheap dowels don't end up on the floor too easily. I was afraid these wooden dogs wouldn't work, wouldn't hold, but even the soft, poplar-like ones from China just end up distorting a little bit to make a flat side, and hold like the dickens.

Even when I stick the dogs up high, it holds like a champ.

And for narrow stock, less than 3 1/4", I can clamp it directly and then nothing is moving when I do that.

I find that sometimes putting a wide piece of scrap in between the dog and the piece I'm working on helps to distribute the load and makes it clamp more securely.

Overall, I really like my wagon vise. It took a lot of fiddling to get it right, mainly because of my lack of skill or design sense, but once I figured out what I wanted to do, and how to do it, it was fairly straight forward. If I had a larger bench, I'd love to use one of the shorter shoulder vise screws used in European workbenches. It would be totally overkill, and would take up a fair amount of your bench, hence you'd need a big top for it to work, but it would be really cool.

And one more comment. When Chris Schwarz talked about his original wagon vise, he mentioned that he was concerned about all that force on just a small block at the end, so he put an end cap on his bench top. I decided to risk it, and I know it's still quite new, but so far it seems like it's doing just fine. It is about 12 square inches of face-to-face glue surface on each side, so that should be pretty strong. And it seems to be working.

Give it a shot on your own bench. Once you get the concept, it's not that difficult.

AAAndrew