Mini Moravian Bench Build Process
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Posted 12th July 2025
After work yesterday, it was far too hot (33°C) to even contemplate going out to the workshop so I just spent the afternoon hiding from the sun and trying to find the coolest place I could. The heat also meant that it was very late by the time I managed to get to sleep, so this morning was a slow start and it was already getting pretty hot.
Nevertheless, I couldn't face the idea of spending the whole day hiding from the sun and getting bored out of my skull so I set up a fan in the workshop and made sure I had plenty of cold fizzy water and a spray bottle full of cold water to "spritz" over myself regularly. I then started with a job that has to be pretty low on the list of good things to do on an unbearably hot day: steaming out the dents I showed in the last post.
This is what it looked like after a few goes with a hot iron and a damp cloth:
This is what it looked like after planing:
You can still feel the dent if you run your hand over it and it is still visible, but it's looking a lot better and I'm sure the leg will get a few smoothing plane passes before it's done so I think it's good enough for now.
The next job was a lot of planing to get the legs all somewhere near square (and square to the mortices). That was very hot work.
The joints aren't great. Some (like the one in the photo above) are absolutely fine. The worst one is that one that had the brass pins for alignment. The joint line is quite visible on that one:
A couple of the mortice halves ended up very slightly misaligned, but that was easily dealt with using my trusty 16 mm chisel:
After all that planing in this heat, I needed a break, so I thought I'd come in and write this post. I'm seriously considering setting a 4am alarm for tomorrow and just accepting I'll be knackered for a lot of the day (at least that might mean I get to sleep more easily on Sunday night ready for work on Monday!). I'm not the best at mornings, but it would mean the temperature would be a bit more bearable for doing workshop stuff. Of course, I'd have to pick the jobs quite carefully: the next job is probably to chop the deep mortices for the cross pieces and I don't think I'd be very popular with the neighbours if I spent the early hours of the morning whacking mortice chisels with a mallet!
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