Garden Bench

I will start out the day by changing out the knives in the surface planer; milling all the rough lumber we've used to date has worn this set out.  So I pop the hood, pull off the dust chute and change the knives.  This planer makes the task easy and straight forward; access is easy and the knives are self indexing, so no height setting gauges are needed.

Next I need to make some room to work.  The long rails are almost 6 feet end to end, so I have to have a minimum of 6 feet either side of the planer and a table nearby to set things on.  These rails are pretty heavy, so I don't want to be doing gymnastics with them as I feed them into the planer and take them out the other side.

Because these rails are a variety of thicknesses -- the boards I used to make the rails were not uniform in thickness -- I arrange them on the table from thickest (2 1/16 inches) to thinnest (1 5/8").  That way as I work the thicker rails down I can include the thinner ones in the rotation as I get down to their dimensions.  I can take off 1/16" at a pass, the thickest will need 9/6ths removed, so it will go through the planer 9 times.  I have 9 rails to work, some will need only two or three passes, but this will be a lengthy process.

When it's finally done I have a stack of boards that are all the same thickness, smooth and pretty on their wide faces, and both these faces are parallel to one another.

I install my long fence on the table saw and set up to trim the narrow edges of the rails smooth, square to the wide faces and to the proper dimensions.  the extra long fence make it easier to get long boards trimmed straight.  A long board with a slight bow to it will just ride along a short fence and you will never get the bow out, just make the board narrower.  But with a long fence that supports the more of the long board, it is possible to straighten a bowed board.

Another tricky fence is now installed on our chop saw.  This bench's long rails are way too long to use our table saw miter fence and slide stops to get precise lengths, and I haven't yet fitted a cut-off fence with stops to the chop saw, so I'll tough it out with a stop-gap measure.  First I attach a piece of wood to the chop saw fence with double stick tape.

Then I start up the saw and lower it through the piece I just attached, leaving a slot in the fence board that is precisely the width of the saw blade.  Now all I have to do is line up the lay-out line on the rail with the proper edge of the saw kerf in the fence board and I have a very precisely placed saw cut.  As long as I'm very careful with my lay-out, this will work fine.

OK, the rail stock is now milled to finished dimensions and we are ready to start the joinery stuff.  This starts by laying out the tenon on each end of each rail.  For this I use a marking gauge.  Since all these tenons are 1 3/4" long I can set the gauge once and use it to scratch a line all around each rail marking the shoulders of the tenon.  This is much quicker and more accurate than using a lay-out ruler and pencil.

Change the setting and I can lay-out the cheek cuts.  These will be 1/8", 1/4" or 3/8" depending on which rail and which face it is on... watch the notes on the templates!

Once again we'll cut the tenon shoulders on the table saw, but this time we need to employ some new techniques.  Because these rails are much longer they will hang over the edge of our table saw enough that the outboard end is heavier than the part laying on the table.  Aside from all the drag caused by trying to slide the rail along the saw table, the end being cut will have a tendency to lift up, making the saw cut too shallow.

The solution to these problems is a cross-cut sled.  It has runners on the bottom side that lay in the grooves in the table saw top to keep it running straight and true, and because the rail will lay on the sled and the whole sled moves as a unit, the rail will not tend to twist forward as I cut the shoulder, ruining the cut.

I use a hand screw clamp to act as a stop block so the saw cuts at precisely the right length, and I clamp a strip of wood to the fence above the rail to act as a hold-down so the rail won't tip up.  I do have to take care to hold the sled itself down to the table as I make the cut, but that is much easier to do once the rail is held securely.

There are three depths of cuts to make, so I set the saw once and make all the cuts at that depth, set the next depth and make all the cuts at that depth rather than constantly changing the blade depth as I go from rail to rail.  When I'm done, all the tenon shoulders are defined to the proper depth and each cut lines up with those on the adjacent faces.

And finally we go back to the band saw to cut the cheeks away.  I use a roller stand to support the rail behind me as I work and because these rails are varying heights I'm using an inside cut (next to the fence) instead of an outside cut as I used on the seat supports.  This way I can set up for a 1/4" cut and make a 1/4" deep tenon cheek regardless of the width of the rail.

After laying out and cutting the two mortises for the middle seat supports front rails are done.  The final job in making the back rails is to make the mortises for the back slats.  Lay-out needs to be as precise as we can get it, we need to be very clear about which section gets cut away and which does not, and we must be very certain to cut the angled mortises in the lower back rail so they go in the right direction!  Because of the tricky joinery we can not simply turn the rail around and install it the other way.

To cut many, many mortises into a 6 foot long rail means I need to move the drill press out of its normal corner and set up some outboard support so I can feed the rail in one side and out the other.  If the mortises are centered in the rail and square to the rail, as they are in the top rails, then I can simply cut to the half-way point, flip the rail around and work it back out the way it came.  This requires a smaller workspace, but since the back rail mortises are angled at 12½°, those rails must be fed through end to end in one direction.

When they are all done I run the rails through the router table to round off the square corners, then run the top rails through again with a larger bit to get a generously rounded top.  As I work on this, Tim gets after the sanding chores to remove the mill marks and pencil lines.  He uses our heavy duty random orbit sander and makes quick work of it.

Those of you who are long-time readers may remember Tim as he used to come help me out on a regular basis.  But when cancer struck him and he decided not to undergo the arduous surgery and treatment process we thought we would surely loose him.  But God intervened and Tim is still with us and doing remarkably well.

And that completes the making of the long rails.

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