Thursday: last day of the class. We bolted the bases together and lag bolted the base to the top. The project finally started to look like a workbench! We then installed the front vises, glued and fit the dogs, glued and screwed the runners on for the shelf and tool tray, and sanded the dovetails. […]
Wednesday: We marked and drilled with a 3/8 bit for the oak pegs that strengthen the mortise and tenon joints. Putting in the pegs, we then used a Japanese saw to cut the pegs down to just proud of the surface. Then we made sure the place were the tail-vise attached the the bench was […]
Tuesday, Day 8 of our workbench class: Scraped each piece that was going to be glued on but that couldn’t be easily accessed after gluing. Next we glued on the outside edges of the bench, the end-caps and dovetailed pieces. We constantly double checked to make sure nothing was glued on backwards or upside-down–easy to […]
We have finished the workbench class and got a little behind on keeping you up to date on what was accomplished each day. So we will be posting over the next few days some of the different steps that it took to finish the benches. It was really a great class and everyone left with […]
Friday: Flattened the dog run in preparation for extending the top tenons. Used a square, knife and chisel making sure the shoulder on the top remained straight all the way across the top. Next cut the groove in the end caps to fit the tenons on the top and cleaned the corners with the chisel, […]
I ran across this Benchtop Shaving Horse the other day in an old Living Woods magazine. It was designed by Nick Gibbs for the Forest Education Initiative in the U.K., based on an idea for standing horses shown in an earlier Living Woods by James Mursell and Bob Slade. What makes this interesting is that it’s great if you don’t have […]
Well, we’ve got three upcoming on-campus one-day classes next week–The Art of Sharpening, Handplanes – Their History and Use and Hand-Cutting Dovetails. In The Art of Sharpening course, you’ll end any frustration with getting the edge and shavings you want. Putting together time-tested methods and modern techniques, we’ll show you how to get a razor edge every time on chisels, […]
The fourth day of our workbench class began by fitting the tenons into their correct mortises; it can be quite time-consuming to make sure that each one fits perfectly. A shoulder plane is handy for this task. We then glued the dog runs that we cut yesterday, on to the bench tops. We then finished fitting all […]
The third day of our workbench course was a lot of work; hard maple is not too forgiving! We started the day by laying out the dog runs. We used a divider to find the correct spacing between the dogs, then used a hand-saw and chisel to remove most of the waste from each dog hole. […]
We started Day 2 of our Workbench Class by cutting the tenons for the center stretchers. We then moved on to machining the tops to finished size. One person at a time would bring their top into the machine room and we would plane it to thickness, joint one edge, rip it to 17” then […]