Workbench Wednesday – #10 (2013) FORP Bench, The Making

As we tried to acclimate to the choking heat of July in south Georgia the work on our individual Roubo benches took hold.  With the slab tops readied by the monster Stratoplaner machine that surfaced all four sides, it was now incumbent on us (me) to glue two of the slabs together to make the top.  Unlike the rest of the crew who chose the mega jointer and PVA for any gluing they needed I worked with a hand plane and hot hide glue.

 

By the next morning I had a complete slab ready for trimming to the right dimension.  I must say that operating a 16″ circular saw is a pretty unforgettable experience.

Then it was on to giant joinery, all of the time.  Working with Jeff Miller, he and I created a sled jig to cut the dovetailed leg tenons on a giant bandsaw, reducing the time for producing that from a few hours to a couple minutes.

Otherwise the leg-top tenons were simply a matter of sawing and chopping.  My old faithful tulipwood mallet was up to the task.

By the third day things were looking positive for getting the unit up on its feet before the week ended.  Once again I took a different tack than the others when it came to the stretchers.  I inset dovetailed stretchers into the surface of the legs rather than the mortise and tenon route, and idea I gleaned from Bob Lang’s video on his modern workbench.  By the end of the day I had the legs all fitted together and was ready for chopping the mortises through the top, which I was set to begin in the morning.

That’s when disruption occurred.

Thursday morning I awoke with my right eye badly inflamed, and told my housemates Raney and Chris that I needed to find an eye doctor.  Right now.   That eye is my more “at risk” of the pair, having undergone at that point 19 surgical procedures according to Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and inflammation was absolutely an enemy.  (The history of that eye proves to me that I’ve got backbone, having gone through all those surgeries and being asleep for only one of them.  Nothing proves your stones quite like complying with, “Now Mr. Williams, hold your head very still and stare straight ahead without blinking while I cut into your eye with this scalpel.  You’ll feel a little sting.” Yeah, that shows your stuff.  Well, that and once facing down a drunk with a gun.)  Thanks to Chris’ smart phone we found a surgical/eye clinic about thirty miles away that could see me “immediately” and thanks to Raney’s generosity in setting aside his own day of working on the bench he drove me there for the appointment.  It took much of the day to undergo the examination (they found no foundational cause for the inflammation) and after getting some medication we headed back to the shop for the end of the day.

Needless to say my heavy work for the week was finished, having lost the entire Thursday to cultivating the screaming headache that hung on into Friday.  I wanted to get back home ASAP to let my own eye doctors on Monday take a look so I spent Friday morning packing up and hit the road that afternoon.  By Saturday afternoon I was back at the barn, having arranged with a friend to bring some of his bubba buddies to help me unload the bench top.  They were ribbing me about needing hep for moving the top, until they set their beers aside and picked it up.  Their grunts and curses soon quieted their ridicule.

The pieces of the bench were ensconced in the barn and remained essentially untouched for more than three years until I could return to it and finish it up.

And they never did find out what riled up my eye.  Sometimes the meat machines we live inside of just get cantankerous.