Some time in March, I finished the bench I had been working on and have finally gotten around to taking a few photos to share.
The seat is a slab of English Walnut and has finished up beautifully after stabilising the cracks with epoxy. Everything else is Ash and has been finished with milk paint. I had originally intended to use an offcut from the slab as the crest rail (backrest thingy), but it was sadly lost to the makerspace at some point along the way.
It was a big project that took a lot longer than expected. The biggest delay was due to the fact I really didn’t like it for a lot of the process:
- There was way too much rake and splay on the legs so the stance a) looked weird and b) took up too much space making it not fit for the intended purpose in a relatively narrow hallway
- I had undercut the seat 30 degrees from vertical with the tracksaw, but didn’t like the effect
- Shaping each of the 16 sticks by hand just killed my mojo! I’d guess there’s an hour or more in each of them
The above meant I lost motivation for a good while and didn’t progress it. In the end I took what felt like quite a radical step of plugging and redoing the mortices for the legs addressing the stance issue. I increased the undercut to 45 degrees by hand which greatly improved the appearance of the seat and waded through the never ending pile of stick shaping.
I’m very happy with the final result. There are still bits I don’t love (I cut the crest rail too narrow in my opinion), but overall I think it came together very well and I was happy that I committed to fixing my design mistakes.
My biggest learning is that I should have sketched up the design first or made a mock up. I did this with the chair I made beforehand, but cut the corner here - this is probably ok when you’ve made a lot of chairs and benches but not on the second attempt! This resulted in me having less conviction in the design and making some mistakes I could have pre-empted.
Anyway, some photos:
