Mini bench

When my son began to express interest again in coming into my shop and hammering on nails, or, as he did last night, working the wagon vise for me as I showed him how to chop out a half-lap joint, I decided to make him his own scaled down bench.

There were a couple of considerations:

1. It was going to be useful for only a short period of time before he outgrew it.

2. It had to stand up to hammering and nailing, most likely at some point directly into the bench so I had to be sturdy, and cheap so I wouldn't care that it got banged up

3. His woodworking needs are limited, including probably no planing at this point

4. It had to be out of materials I had on hand.

So, I settled on a bunch of 2x6 and 2x4 lumber I had sitting around my shop for years and which were bone dry at this point. It was thick enough to give some solidity, cheap enough to not worry about him trashing it at this point, and easy enough to work with.

The Bench Top

I started with the top. I jointed a couple of 2x6's and glued them together.

Nothing pretty, but solid enough. The boards were also a bit wanky. That's my technical term for slightly cupped, not flat, even a little wavy in places.

I could have flattened them individually before jointing them, but since they were so small, I decided to get them glued and then tackle them together as a single surface.

I first trimmed them to length.

Then I began with my old German scrub plane.

You can see the kinds of shavings I was getting. I didn't set it to be very aggressive because this pine will splinter like anything if you try.

After that, I began the diagonal traversing. You can see what happens when you have no camber on the blade and go across grain.

The last step was to plane down the grain with my #3 to smooth out the marks from the other planes. I also ended up taking some passes with one of my #6 planes as a kind of joiner plane before my #3 but it all seemed flat enough for my purposes so didn't spend much time before jumping right to the smoother.

And here is a little display of the different kinds of shavings that result from the different operations. I dug through my shaving pile and found, from left to right:

Scrub plane chips - Early traversing short shavings - Longer shavings from traversing - Thicker shavings along the grain to take down the high spots left from traversing - Final thinner shavings from smoothing.

The Base

The next time I was in the shop I began the base. Here I'm going back to my supply of dry, cheap construction lumber. I think 2x4's are sufficient for the legs. I figured just half-lap joints to affix the front and back cross pieces, made out of a scrap 1x4, and some simple through M&T joints for the end cross pieces. My design at this point is to mortise and tenon the base into the top so I figured to leave some wood above the half lap for this.

I decided to put the front and back cross pieces up just under the top because I wanted to leave the bottom as open as possible for him to stand, and the size of the bench and the lack of much clamping up at the top made this possible. I figured I can always flip the legs upside down as I get them built and put the cross member at the bottom if I decide to.

This is indicative of another aspect of this project I wanted to explore: improvisation. I'm working pretty rough and pretty imprecise. I'm using the material itself for measurements so I have no idea how big any of this is. If I were to take more care with this, as I certainly will for his next bench when he's old enough to actually do stuff, the proportions would have been different, and I would have taken care to shape and size the various components to look better together. As it is, I have a feeling it will look a bit odd once it's finished, but I'm looking to spend as little time making it while still having it be functional for its limited requirements.

So, I started cutting the legs.

Using one leg to indicate the size of the next

You can see the precise layout tools I'm using reflect the obsessive drive for perfection in this piece.

Using my bench hook I first trim

Then do a quick squaring off just using my bench hook as a quick-and-dirty shooting board rather than get out my dedicated one. This is part of my drive to do this as quickly as possible.

After getting the legs cut and squared, I figured out about how far apart they were by using a scrap of 2x4 as spacer. I need the legs far enough apart so that the bench is stable, but want to leave some room on the ends so I can do through through mortise and tenons to affix the base to the top.

At this point I started to touch up the surfaces of the legs. I don't need them perfect, just better than straight-from-the-borg 2x4. I'm shooting for "flat enough".

Here's a good indication of how the board itself told me I was flat enough. This wood has been in my shop for at least six years, some of it may very well be older. It has a kind of oxidation to the outside of it that is darker than the inside wood. The two pictures below show you what one board looks like as I start to flatten it. Notice in the first picture the contrasting lighter and darker areas. The lighter areas are the high spots, and the darker are the low spots after a pass or two. Once it all looks the same, as in the second picture, I know I'm done. Good enough.

I looked for a short piece of fairly narrow stock for the end cross pieces. I found this wanky piece of very soft wood. I'm not even sure where or when I picked it up. At first I thought it might be maple, but planing it was so easy and it was so soft that I suspect it's basswood. But good enough.

And now I have my material.

Cutting the joints

Layout was simple. I used the top as indicator of how far down I needed to take the half-lap joints I was going to use to join the front and back cross pieces to the legs. I left a little material on the ends assuming I'll trim it flush to the top.

I used the cross piece itself to figure out how wide to make it.

I used the material again to determine how far into the wood to cut. At this point I decided not to go with a half-lap but to take advantage of the thicker legs and just cut the full thickness into the leg. That's one less part of a joint to cut. Quick and dirty, but functional.

I cut to the lines and then started hacking it out with my chisel and mallet. You've got to be careful because this pine will splinter past your line if you just look at it funny.

I used my old router plane to sneak down to the final depth.

You can see the bottom of the cut is still not too pretty, but it got better with subsequent joints. I learned to stop hacking with the chisel sooner and cut with the router plane longer.

Voila! A couple of half-way decent joints for quick and dirty.

I have all four of these joints cut now. Next I will actually put them together and then work on the end pieces.

Pictures of the Process, Part 3

Alright. I have the wagon vise finally worked out! That was a big source of trouble and headache, mainly because I was trying to figure out how to do it on my own. In the end, it's a pretty simple concept, but the execution was a bit more challenging. I'm sure I made it much harder than it needed to be, but it was also a learning experience for me. So glad that's over!

Now onto something a lot more straight forward. I need to cut a groove into the bottom of the first rail to accept the top of the sliding deadman. I decided to cut the groove now, before glueing up the boards since I had already had experience with the fun of cutting a long groove in this wood by hand.

My boards for the top are 7/4 thick. The boards for my sliding deadman are 4/4. So the question becomes, where to put the groove? One consideration is that I'm seriously considering making, in addition to the sliding deadman, a sliding leg vise to go into that slot. I've seen a couple out there on other web sites and to me, it gives me the benefits of an adjustable double screw face vise while also allowing me the flexibility of two independent screws without having to worry about racking, and yet still able to have the deadman for everyday work.

But that's for the future. With this in mind, though, I decide to build the slot deeper into the front board to allow for the pressures that a sliding leg vise exert. I end up putting the groove one-inch in from the front and make it 3/4" wide. I also make it 1 1/2" deep. For my sliding deadman I will attached a piece of 3/4 board to the back of the deadman that will slide in the slot.

So, now for the layout. I get it laid out and start cutting a series of relieving cuts similar to how you cut for half-blind dovetails.






I get all the way to the end and stand up the board. That's when I realize that I've laid out and cut the cuts on the OUTSIDE face of the front board. After a short, therapeutic spell of exclamations and verbal ejaculations, I get out the last spare board I have and carefully, very carefully lay out exactly what I'm going to cut and where. This is where I come up with my daily lessons in the earlier post.

I cut the damned groove one more time, and cut the relieving cuts for the deadman slot again, this time on the inside face of the board. Notice the very explicit markup on the board.





I begin to take out the waste using my wonderful Butcher pigsticker again, as well as some other finer chisels for clean up. There was a reason for this piece to be my final backup. The grain on it goes every which way and there are streaks of discoloration all through it. I don't mind the discoloration, but the wild grain made it an extra pain to cut out this waste.




Finely, I had everything ready and I did a dry run clamp up without glue. Amazingly enough, it all fit together and began to look like a workbench.

I took the leap and glued up the first four rows of boards together. I did these as one piece because of all of the fiddly bits of the wagon vise and the opening for the planing stop at the other end.





At this point I took a break and went next door for a St. Paddy's day open house. I was temperance itself (relatively) and only had one hard cider with my corned beef and cabbage because I was anxious to get back and finish up.

I came back and began adding pieces. You can see that boards 5-14 were purposely left a bit long, as I mentioned in earlier posts. Today I will get to trim that off. In the first picture you can see the opening for the planing stop near the other end. I did trim that just a bit to make sure it was square before continuing the glue up.



In this next picture you see my little glue pot. I'm not sure where I picked it up, but it's got a big ol' brush built into the lid which is perfect for these massive glue up situations. It really lays down the glue thickly enough and yet the brush allows me to spread it round quickly and evenly. I've tried those little acid brushes, which work ok for small parts, and old credit cards (or hotel key cards) for spreading glue, but nothing works as well as this little modest glue pot for large glue jobs.



I worked my way along, sometimes adding two at a time, sometimes just one. I took my time and eventually made it all the way to 14!!








As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I've laid out the lines to trim to using a very old carpenter's square I have. It's still square and works perfectly for this operation.





You can see here how I numbered each board. Some eventually got shifted around, as you can see by the cross outs. I wasn't too worried about pencil marks on the top as I'm going to have to flatten the top anyway and will take off the marks then. The numbers actually served a couple of purposes. It helped me keep my boards in some kind of order, and also they indicated grain direction. If I placed the board with the number right-side-up from where I stood, then the grain all runs in the same direction. This way, when I go to smooth the top I can plan from right to left and, as much as possible, the grain will cooperate.



Well, that's it for now. Today I trim the ends of the top, and try to flip it and cut the mortises for the leg tenons. I will then attempt to affix the base to the top, and get my big, strong nephew to come over and help me flip it and put it down on the ground. At that point I'll probably have to shift my workshop around to accommodate two benches while I make the leg vise.

Wish me luck!

AAAndrew