Update Competition Entry
Well after what seems to be weeks of torturous malaise and frustration I finally had a breakthrough over the weekend despite my claims that I was going to leave it for a couple of weeks - I just couldn't, it was mocking me!
Change of plans:
I'm not ashamed to admit that my ambitions and plans far outreached my abilities. Hence the knackering up of the trestle feet and tops - I made a real pigs ear of the mortices. After many hours of contemplation and re-reading of 'The Workbench Book'
Amazon Link I came across a design by Niall Barrett (Page 136). It used a bolt arrangement to join the rails and stretchers to the legs forgoing the trestle setup. This meant I could scrap the mistakes and use the wood I had for the top pair of rails for the internal stretchers - this was an excellent solution.
I do however have to point out that this bench was supposed to be a traditionally built heirloom piece, alas; I feel I am not yet experienced or good enough to produce such a piece, so this has been a good experience in many ways, mostly that I need to concentrate on the basics before trying to keep up with Nibbo et al
On to the pics:
Leg arrangments bolted together, and rails cut to size:
Using the MFT to clamp the piece, and a veritas block + chamfer guide, I planed a tapered small chamfer on the rails (I also did the legs)
Sanded to 120grit and smoothed using the veritas block, the legs arrangements are ready to fix to the rails:
MFT coming to some use again: The components are assembled using the flat top of the festool table:
Base Complete (just requires a finish)
Close up of the tapered chamfer. It's only a small detail, but I wanted to try and include at least some hand/craft element.
So there we go, some progress finally! The bolt-recesses in the stretchers and rails were created by using a kitchen worktop straight cutter and a ply template; thanks to the advise from numerous members I managed to do this quite successfully despite some failings in this department earlier in the project (Thanks to everyone who has helped me so far - it really is appreciated a great deal!!)
I shall be starting on the worktop this week with an aim to finish next monday. The top is going ahead as planed except I'm not adding a bread-board end as I'm staying close to the Niall Barrett design. Also like his, I'll only be having one vice at the front of the bench, unlike his however i'll be including a couple of rows of dog-holes and a number of holes for tool placement at the back of the bench. Loose ply tongues will be used to aid alignment as advised, now that I've got the hang of using templates and routers, this should be quite a straight-forward task.
