A busy week.....

Another busy week here at Rowden. I started the week with a Life Drawing session (my third) and really enjoyed it. This was the result....



Then it was onto finishing the underframe for my bench and making a set of wedges.



The two sides are glued together but the stretchers are dry fitted using wedges so that the bench can be easily disassembled and moved if/when necessary. I decided to go for Maple wedges (to match the bench top) spliced with a strip of Purple Heart - a hint of what's to come vice-wise...



And then it was on to the bench top and lugging a number of 2-metre plus long (very heavy) planks of maple about the machine room to get them down to size. I managed a couple before needing a cuppa and a sit down! I'm still digging the splinters out of my hands.
Meanwhile, as it was pouring with rain outside (and I mean really pouring) Stanners decided it would be much more fun to sit outside the workshop and keep lookout than stay in on his own and have a snooze in his basket. Hence, I returned to find one very wet dog!

And amidst all that I've been working on the design for a coffee table - my first commisson post-bench! I can't believe I've been here nearly four months already. It's going way too fast.

More next week.....

I made a pair of smaller trestles for when I'm making something heavy and can't lift it onto the big ones. Stanley, however, had other ideas!

It's got legs....

First up the trestles.... this was our Machine Room induction project. Very basic - made from pine - with a few too many compound angles for my liking!



And now for bench news ....



After a weekend of solid sanding, the frame is just about complete. Phew!

You've been framed

So... the wood arrived for my bench and I've spent the last week getting it from this (above) to this (below).



















Most of this was done in the machine room - now that we are officially allowed in, post-induction. But the final surfaces still had to be planed by hand. Having gone from spending the best part of a week getting a flat planed surface to this, there are definite signs of progress.

That said, I'm rubbish at maths so getting the angles right wasn't the easiest of tasks. Maybe I've just forgotten it all from school - or maybe I'm just a bit rubbish at it. Either way,
I probably still wouldn't have worked it out had it not been for Tim's step-by-step guide (and patience!) Just a couple more cuts on the tenons to do tomorrow and then we should be set to assemble the frame - very exciting.

I also nipped over to Yandles woodyard in Somerset this weekend in search of some Purple Heart for my vice - not to be confused with the drug of the same name prevalent amongst pill-popping teens in the sixties, and indeed a vice of a very different kind! But more about that later - the wood and the vice.