Garden Bench

In this step we will make the front and rear legs for this bench.

We start by laying out the shape of the leg onto the leg blank that we made up in the last step.  If there are knots or other blemishes in the timber, we must try to avoid those.  Because none of the leg sides will use an outside edge of the blank, I do not waste time trimming the blanks smooth and pretty.

The front legs are another story.  Here I can use the edge of the blank for the long straight back edge of the leg, and the opposite edge for the straight part on the upper leg, so I trim the blank to the right width on the table saw and cut both ends of the blank smooth and square on the miter saw.

Then the legs go to the band saw fitted with a 3/8" 6 T.P.I. (teeth per inch) band.  I take my time and cut just a little outside of the line.  White oak is tough stuff and I don't want to have to sand away any more then I must, but don't want to end up with saw marks remaining because I cut right to the line either.  Slow and steady does the job.

Once all the legs are cut to shape they go to a stationary belt sander with an 80 grit belt installed.  Here I refine the shape and remove the saw marks.  The tricky bits, like the squiggle at the tip of the front leg, require some inventiveness to get the job done on this sander.  But inventiveness is my specialty.

When all the sanding is done, the legs shape is pretty much complete.  I will do no more sanding until after the joinery processes are complete.

Next we take a good look at the legs and pair them up by color and grain pattern, decide which way we want the legs oriented: which face is "out", and label them under the foot so we will be able to keep them oriented.

Now we grab our templates and get ready to lay-out the mortise locations on each leg.  It is very important to keep an eye on orientation so we don't end up with two left legs.  Each leg has mortises on two faces: the inside face for the long rails, and the front face of the rear legs and the rear face of the front legs where spreaders, seat supports and the arms will attach.  Our template shows locations for all of them.  Those that are on the inside face are marked by laying the template on top of the leg and tapping a small awl through holes drilled in the template face to mark the corners of each mortise.  Front & rear mortises are located by transferring the top and bottom lines for each mortise from the template then finding and marking the center line using an Incra ruler with edge guide.

Once they are all laid out and double checked, the legs take turns going over to the mortising machine.  These are big mortises: 3/4" wide and almost 2" deep -- but then most everything about this bench is massive -- and chopping out mortises this size in white oak takes some time.

Smaller mortises can be cut by drilling a series of square holes the width of the mortise right next to each other, and plunging full depth with each cut.  But big guys like these, in hard wood, need to be nibbled out, working back and forth along the mortise to remove the stock evenly a little at a time.

The front legs aren't too much of a challenge but the rear legs, with that dog-leg shape are, especially the one mortise closest to the bend in the leg.

The final task is to create the tenon on the top of the front leg that will fasten to a mortise cut in the bottom of the arm. Cutting the shoulder using the table saw is not at all difficult for the left side of the leg post, but the right side presents a problem: the squiggle at the top of the post prevents the long edge from sitting against the miter fence, and the flat part at the top is way to short to provide a solid base for running the post through the saw.  The unsupported bottom of the leg would drag on the table tip the leg in toward the fence and ruin the cut.The solution is to have saved one of the slabs I cut off the legs in making that squiggle, slip that piece in between the leg and fence and Viola! solid support while cutting the right side shoulder.

I finished the tenons by cutting away the cheeks on the band saw, more about how to do that in Step 6.

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