debor054

As I haven't built a stool for a while, I decided to try my hand at a Shaker style bench / stool.  My scaffold boards have warped a fair bit in drying meaning a full bench was not really practical. Ok, I admit it, with a lot of planing it could be done, but my natural laziness told me to keep it small... hence I'm calling it a Shaker stool. With some inspiration from Google images I rough cut my two side pieces of timber and attacked them with my winding sticks, a no#6 Foreplane set for a heavy cut followed by my no#7 Try plane set fine to get them flat. After getting the edges straight and parallel, I cut the ends square on the bench hook.  I am definitely getting faster as milling rough sawn boards into usable stock. The main feature of this stool is the cut out design of the side pieces. I first found the centre of the board and marked the position of my desired hole.  Now it's confession time... I didn't have an auger bit large enough and resorted to using ....

I decided to make use of my newly acquired antique oak mainly to see what it will look like when planed and finished. I also decided some more dovetails wouldn't do me any harm. So, in the same style as my last dovetailed box  I got started. I wont go into great detail as the build process has obviously been covered before. Usual drill - cut the four pieces to make the box sides and shoot them to exact length. Exact length being - two pairs, each pair being exactly the same size - I didn't bother to measure actual length. I also made the effort to avoid all knots and only used clear straight grained pieces of Pine. The next stage, mark out the dovetails, I'm still a tails first guy... and ... I got to try the new Poor Mans Moxon vice out properly. My brain obviously hadn't woken up yet ... Look at my 'waste marks' ... phew! Luckily, I realised what I had done, before grabbing the saw! I got the tails cut and chiselled out without any further mishap. Wow! ..What...

Up until now I have been struggling with work holding on my little bench and its poor excuse for a face vice, especially if I need to hold a wide board for dovetailing for example. My usual solution is to stand the end of the board on something below the vice and pinch one side of the board in the end of the vice and use an offcut to minimise the vice racking and hope it holds... Far from ideal! Therefore, with my last dry (it hasn't stopped raining over here in the UK) scaffold board, I decided to make a poor mans version of the Moxon Vice  (Utube). Life started out by rough cutting the board to length. Raised beds function really well as saw horses. While sawing the board the cross cut saw started to bind indicating that there seemed to be a lot of internal stresses inside the wood. I had to finish the cut from the opposite side, at least its only a rough cut.   The next step was to rip the board into two pieces using my 5 ppi rip saw.   Again the saw started to b...