Another day, another update! Can I keep up this breakneck pace? Probably not, but it's nice to have a project on the go again, and one which may well take quite a while.
One thing I forgot to say was that I don't have a full size drawing of this bed; we'll see whether that comes back to bite me later on. However, many of the dimensions, as I have mentioned, are set by the old bed, so I can re-use some of the parts. What's harder is knowing exactly how big to make everything. I'm aware that a few mm can be the difference between something looking harmonious and it just looking clumsy. So I did spend some time experimenting with dimensions of the legs, the cross rails and the chamfered capping piece that goes across the top.
Here we have the results of that time: a bit of fence post, planed down to 2 5/8" square, with a scrap of ash at 3½" wide and a bit of oak, ¾" thick with a 60° bevel.
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What do you think? I decided on two things, both reversible. One is that the top rail needs to be thicker, probably 7/8", the other is that it's really critical that it sits forward of the top of the leg. In other words, the chamfer mustn't meet the vertical surface of the leg; it has to be set forward of it. So my capping rail has to be thicker and wider than the offcut of oak seen here.
My first job this morning was to tackle the two boards which will make the side rails. These are not far off the required size.
Thickness is ex 1" and I should be able to keep that up to about 7/8" - an advantage of hand planing, I believe - what's the minimum cut you could make with a planer or a thicknesser?
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The challenge is the length. These are just over 8' long, about the same as my bench, which has very little spare space at the ends. I'm not complaining - I built it that way - and I take full responsibility for the working conditions.
There's just room for the plane iron to clear the left hand end without hitting anything:
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but the right hand end does need me to grasp the front knob and plane on the pull stroke:
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You'll notice that the far end is resting on a spare bit of wood cramped under the bench, but encouragingly, these boards barely deflect when being planed.
Next I selected the best bits of each one and trimmed them down to the proper length, plus a bit. Not sure why I didn't do that first!
Then it was time for some more comical, corner to corner table sawing. Here's the infeed side:
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and here's the outfeed:
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I am very safety conscious when using the table saw, so as well as needing time to move it, I need to wedge it level and make sure that there is room all round. I'm not saying this to recommend my way of working - with hindsight, I'd have been better off buying a bigger bandsaw - but it's really just my way of showing how machine woodworking isn't a quick way of working if you do it in a small, crowded space.
The only other thing I got done was to debark all the useful looking offcuts. I did this because the outer layers are where you'll find any flight holes and I wanted to minimise the risk of any pests emerging and finding a new home, or of SunnyBob burning the house down as a precaution on one of his trips back to the UK.
I ripped most of the bark off on the table saw, but for the thick bits I found that the quickest, easiest way was to use a drawknife.
There's enough in this lump to make a few hammer handles, or legs for a low bench, so it's worth keeping.
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The drawknife is a French one, bought on eBay, new old stock.
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I don't know who made it, but I think it might have come from one of the many companies that used to be concentrated along the river Tarn, not an area famous for its striped wildlife, but where is?
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And in a further demonstration that Sheffield was never the only source of good tools, I finished off with a modern day scrub plane that I believe to be made by
Pinié in the Czech Republic, one of the very few contemporary volume manufacturers of wooden planes:
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Next time - some more planing and maybe a digression or two!