Making Shop Bents By Hand – Part Two

In my last post on this subject I outlined my strategy to become as good a woodworker as Tom Fidgen.  Having concluded, from studying his book Made By Hand, that he’s achieved his prowess by having a set of shop bents available to him I decided to build a set of my own, thus improving my woodworking skills.

When I left off, I’d been sawing and planing up a storm.  I’d created all the boards for this project and was ready for joinery work.  I’d like to point out that this approach is somewhat atypical for me.  Those, including me, who work with power tools learn to do all the wood prep, create the parts, and then do the assembly.  In short, we make a kit and then we build it.  This is mostly a reflection of the time required to set up power tools and their jigs and we take advantage of a set up by processing as many pieces as we can simultaneously.

When working with hand tools, however, none of this is necessary or even desireable as there is no tool set up and/or adjustment.  The single exception might be setting up marking gauges and most hand tool users own several gauges that we set and they remain set for the duration of a project.  I have a mortising gauge set to the width of my mortising chisel and it never changes.

And so, while you might have gotten tired just reading about me planing and sawing for 4 hours to create the parts, normally those activities would be scattered throughout the creation process, make it much easier.  But in this case, the basic parts are ready, let’s get on with the building.

Making Feet

I started with the feet, which amount to 2″ x 24″ boards that are relieved in the middle to form 4 contact surfaces.  This isn’t necessary if your floor is flat.  Mine isn’t.  On the opposite side, a 1 1/8″ deep mortise is cut in the center to accept the upright.

I suppose there are many ways to do such a relief.  I marked the center of the leg and a point 3/8″ up from the bottom surface.  I also marked a point 4″ in from one end on the lower edge.  I freehanded a curve between them following the TLAR (that looks about right) approach.  I duplicated this curve on a piece of cardstock,  laid the pattern down, aligning it with the bottom edge and the center mark.  I then drew the curve on the wood.  I flipped the pattern and repeated the process on the other side of the center mark and I knew where the bowsaw had to go.

I removed most of the waste using a bow saw cutting just outside my line and achieved final shaping with a spokeshave and rasp.  You might note that I’m using one of the inexpensive 4-in-1 rasps .  For small jobs like this I find the tool very useful as you have both rough and smooth, curved and flat surfaces.  It’s short length is also advantageous in these situations.  On larger jobs, however, it becomes hard to hold as you’re holding the actual teeth of the rasp.

Mortise and Tenon Joints

Though this is a simple project, on a per-board-foot basis, there are a lot of mortise and tenon joints.  There are four through tenon joints that fasten the uprights to the lower spreaders and four stub tenons that attach the uprights to the feet.  In my world, most tenons are 1/4″ because I own a 1/4″ mortising chisel.  Technically this is a bit thin for 7/8″ wood (dogma is they should be 1/3 the wood thickness) but it’s close enough to suit me – sort of like the guy who only owns a hammer being faced with a screw I suppose.  I doubt that anyone owns a .29″ wide chisel anyhow.

I’m not going to bore you with details of my mortise and tenon creation as I’ve shown that in other posts.  This process isn’t as hard as it seems and there is little magic involved.  Sharp chisels and an eye towards getting the inside walls perpendicular to the face are all that’s necessary.  I lay out my tenons to fit exactly in the long dimension but a bit fat.  I size them with a shoulder plane while fitting them to the mortise.  If you don’t have a shoulder plane, that 4-in-1 rasp I mentioned will do the job as well.  A sharp chisel is handy for cleaning up the base of the mortise to achieve a good, flush fit.

Once the mortises and tenons were chopped/cut, I had this pile of parts:

Notice the two darker pieces.  I mentioned that the top spreaders would be cut from a “BORG 1×3″.  This is them.  I find it odd that these are so much darker than the rest as all was sold as red oak.  It’s likely that the BORG wood is imported while the rest is local but the color difference is something I cannot explain.

Test Assembly
Fitting mortises amounts to repeated tenon trimming, followed by checking fit.  The goal is to get them tight enough that you can assemble the piece without glue.  If nothing else this is a woodworker pride thing but tight mortise/tenon joints are very strong; loose joints, not so much.

And so the time comes to put this idea to the test – the dry fit.  There is something very satisfying about this stage.  It is a bit hard on the arm as you wrench it around, trying to pat yourself on the back but otherwise – satisfying.  Notice that at this point I had yet to notch in the top spreaders.  To be honest, I simply forgot to do it before dry-fitting and taking this photo.  Getting old is hard sometimes.

The one last thing I did was to mark, lightly, where the uprights and feet come together.  Then, using a block plane, I went over all of the parts, rounding over the edges just to dull them, excepting the foot/upright mortise/tenon location.  I did a bit of scraper work to finish smooth all the parts and then I remembered that I needed to cut the notches.

Cutting top notches
The top spreaders are removable and sit in slots cut in the uprights.  The spreaders themselves are notched to form a face that sits against the inside of the spreader.  My goal here was to have a press fit rather than a loose fit.  This worked out very nicely and, I think, adds strength to the design.

I marked out the upright notches and used my dovetail saw to cut the verticals, followed up with a fretsaw to cut across the bottom.  The bottom of the slot was squared up with a chisel.  I cut the spreader notch using two simple straight cuts.  Fitting was done with a paring chisel and I was very happy with the results as I can pull the joint apart but it requires a tug to do so.

Final Assembly/Finishing

Mortise/tenon joinery works best if you drawbore the joints.  Not only does this add strength, it helps the joints look nice as the drawboring pulls the joint together tighter.

For those unfamiliar with the process, you pull the tenon and drill a hole (3/8″ in this case) through both mortise cheeks.  You replace the tenon and mark the centerpoint of the hole on the tenon.   You then drill the tenon hole slightly closer to the tenon shoulder than the marked point.  Thus, when you drive a dowel through the holes, it pulls the tenon into the mortise.  If you’re really well-equipped, you own drawbore pins that can test the joint before you add glue and drive the dowel.  Maybe someday I’ll get some of those but, to quote Aragorn of Lord of the Rings fame, “It is not this day.”

I used hot hide glue on all of the joinery.  I like it for a number of reasons, discussed elsewhere on this blog.  All of the mortises are cut to 1 1/8″ while the tenons are 1″, providing some space for any excess glue to go.  I slathered glue on the tenon, stuck the joint together and pounded pre-cut 3/8″ dowel segments through the holes.  Use extra-long dowel segments for this, cutting off the extra using a flush-cut saw.

As this is a piece of shop furniture, I used a couple coats of linseed oil as a finish.  I rarely put a surface finish on shop tools as it just gets dinged up and its hard to repair.  So, here they are. 

I should say a couple words about dimentions.  I made these 24″ wide because Tom’s bents were 24″ wide.  For heights, however, I set the lower spreader to the height of my sawbench and the top spreaders to my workbench.  This should maximize their functionality so give some thought to this before launching your own shop bent project.

Conclusion

Sadly, while I have a nice set of bents, Tom is still a better woodworker than I am.  I guess I need to read Made By Hand again.

Cheers — Larry

larry@woodnbits.com

Making Shop Bents By Hand – Part One

Tom Fidgen’s new book, Made By Hand has become my constant companion, at least that’s how it seems.  It’s the closest I’ll get to an apprenticeship with a woodworker who works in ways I want to work.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that Tom is a much better woodworker than I am.  The natural question is why, of course.  I looked at his tools.  He does have more tools than I have but I have a decent, though basic, set of hand tools.  I’ve read his philosophy and approach, all similar to my own views of woodcraft.  And when I looked the chapter on “appliances” I found I have all of those too – all of them except a set of “bents.”  Voila, that MUST be it!  Tom’s secret to being a good woodworker is having shop bents.

And so, with much anticipation of the impending leap forward in my woodworking skills, I descended into the shop to build a set of bents.  This was the morning of Dec 31st, 9:45AM.

I point out the start time as I want to talk a bit about wood selection/layout, wood prep and parts creation using hand tools.  So often we’re told this is complicated, time-consuming, or downright impossible without burning electrons.  I’ll admit that it takes more time than shoving boards through a screaming machine, but that’s not much fun and I can’t hear my tunes.  I’ll admit that it requires acquisition and practice of some skills but given the number of table saw accidents, one might speculate that some table saw users would benefit in some training as well.  Enough with the philosophy, time’s a wasting.  Let’s build bents.

Wood Selection/Layout

I looked through my stash of wood and came up with a couple 5-foot long oak boards.  I’m not very good about developing cut lists and such for projects and, frankly, don’t feel they’re as useful as many claim.  Sure, you’ve got to have some idea of how much wood you need but because wood is not a uniform material, the real ‘cut list’ must be created after you get a bunch of wood.  So, I prefer to do my planning right on the wood as I can work around knots or other imperfections.

I used an old Sharpie rather than a pencil for the photos so I hope you can see what I’ve done for this project.  Admittedly, this is a simple project requiring a bunch of 2″ wide boards, six of which need to be 24″ long while four need to be 32″ long.  Then you need the top spreaders, which are another two pieces 24″ long.  I had a BORG (Big Orange Retail Giant) 1×3 piece of oak and decided I’d use this piece for the these, giving me spreaders a bit (2 1/2″) wider than the rest of the parts.  You can see how I’ve quickly drawn where on the boards the various parts would come from.  Notice that I’ve worked around the knot in the middle of one board and I avoided a check on the left end of the other.  And yes, you’re right, those aren’t very straight lines (grin).  As I did this I measured width and length to ensure that the piece could come from the area but those lines aren’t intended to be actual cut lines.  In fact, before most of the cutting is done, all of these planning lines will be gone as a result of wood preparation.

For completeness sake, the wider board was slightly cupped but with little wind (twist).  The thinner board had a bit of twist in it but was otherwise pretty straight.

Divide and Conquer

Just to make wood prep easier, I cut each of the boards in half.  I find that truing up an 5-foot board takes longer than truing two, shorter boards.  So, here is the starting point.

Board Preparation

At this point I’d burned 15-20 minutes, most of it pondering.  Now it was time to go to the gym – well sort of.  Armed with a jack plane (#5), I started flattening a face of each of the four boards.  When that was done, I flipped the boards over and flattened the other side.  I also brought one edge square to the faces for reference.  You need one edge and one face to act as references for all other measurements.  As I was starting with 4/4 lumber, by the time all this exercise was done I had boards that were 7/8″ thick.

Burning Calories, Having Fun, and Saving Money

This gave me shop bents that were a bit more robust than if I’d purchased finished lumber (3/4″) at the local BORG and it only cost me $15-20 for the required wood instead of $65 (I checked) if I bought it pre-finished from the BORG.  And best of all, I got some exercise, listened to some music while planing, and I know that wood really well.  It’s hard to explain how special that last part is.  Maybe I’m just being weird about that.

It was time for lunch, a few minutes after noon.  At this point I had spent a couple hours of enjoyable shop time.  No dust created, though I did quickly sweep all the shavings into a pile.

Creating Parts

After lunch, it was back to the gym… err… shop.  I rubbed some wax on my old Spear & Jackson rip saw and created the actual boards.

Normally I would do this on an ‘as I need them’ basis so I don’t spend an hour just sawing.  But I wanted to complete this part of the project so I could say, “See, you can do this by hand and you won’t die.”  It took me a an hour and a half to rip all the pieces and and true up the edges with a #7 jointer plane.  So, the total work time to this point is 3 1/2 – 4 hours, and it was fun, which is why I do this in the first place.

Next time I’ll talk a bit about the actual construction.

Cheers — Larry

larry@woodnbits.com