I got fed up of the kids blocking the stairs when they're putting their shoes on so I designed and built a bench for our hallway. It's the first piece of furniture I've designed and built from scratch. Top and slats are oak. Frame is pine, painted white to match our staircase. The small inlay is a Jay from white maple (cut on my cheapo 3018 CNC).
Some things I learned from the build:
- Getting accurate mortice and tenons is tough. My joints were so loose on my first attempt that I ended up scrapping the whole frame and starting again.
- The angled legs made it much more difficult to get the frame completely square and the joints tight. There's probably some technique to this which I'm missing.
- I hate working with pine. It's so soft that the slightest ding leaves a permanent mark. I also felt like my chisels/plane irons were never sharp enough to cut pine end grain. Maybe I just need to work on my sharpening game.
- I got the slats to fit pretty well by routing a rebate in stretchers, putting the slats on the stretchers, then glueing equally sized wooden spacers such that the slats were flush with each one. Once the glue started to dry I carefully removed the slats so that the stretchers could be painted, then replaced the slats after painting for a nice flush fit. The video shows this.
- The plan was done in Fusion 360 and I found it very useful for being able to change one dimension and have all dependent dimensions be updated automatically.
Any tips (or criticism!) gratefully received. Very much still learning.
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