Workbench Wednesday – Romastonian Low Workbench 2

With my former planing beam cut almost all the way through using my trusty 10-inch circular saw I was left with sawing the last inch of thickness by hand.  Grabbing my equally trusty ancient 3-1/2 t.p.i. handsaw I made short work of the separation, getting almost 1-1/2 inches of cut per stroke.

I then made a nuisance mistake by cutting off the wrong end of the timbers I was only going to make a six-foot bench).  I should have cut of the end with the wainey edges, but instead I cut off the nice crisp end.  So now I had to take a few minutes to plane flat the rounded edge and glue on a new piece in order to make it square.

That I accomplished by just sawing off and hand planing the excess.

With the pieces separated I dove in with my scrub plane to get everything more or less planar by eye.  The beam had a bit of wind in it which became exaggerated (doubled) by the splitting.  Once the mating surfaces were flat-ish, or at least fitted each other nicely,  I got out my fave toothing plane and got it mated for real, ready for the, er, mating.  In this instance I used PVA, in part because I did not know the final environment for the bench but really because I had not prepared hot hide glue in advance and thus had none ready to go when I was determined to execute the glue-up.

It is really comforting and confirming when the squeeze-out is uniform through the length and breadth of the joint.