Mini Moravian Bench Build Process
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Posted 12th July 2025
Well, the results are in and they're rather unambiguous. I've done two more mortices, one with the mortice chisel and one with the drill brace, so I'm halfway there now:
The mortice one took half-an-hour in total, with 18 minutes spent chopping straight through, 7 minutes chopping the angled ends, 2 minutes paring the sides and 1 minute tidying up the ends.
The drilled one took 21 minutes in total, with 8 minutes marking and drilling followed by 13 minutes of chopping, paring and tidying up.
The difference was bigger than I expected. As to which I enjoyed more, it probably was the mortice chisel, but there wasn't much in it. I haven't decided what to do about the remaining sockets; I might well continue with one of each on each leg! If I do manage to get up early tomorrow, then I might do all the drilling of all the mortices (as it's quiet) and then sort out the chopping later on in the day. However, I've also got a metalwork (milling machine) job I want to get on with and that would be ideal as it'll be quite quiet and that end of the garage is far worse in the heat than standing near the door at the woodworking bench.
I'm really, really pleased with how today has gone. I'd half-expected to get to the end of the weekend having done nothing more than perhaps undoing the clamps on the glued-up legs. Instead I've managed to plane them all and chop half the remaining mortices and all by the end of Saturday. I've needed regular breaks and I've drank litres and litres of water, but it's been good. I couldn't have done it without the atomiser bottle to squirt water all over myself and the two big fans that have both been pointing at me and running at full power the whole time I've been out there:
Page 14 of 17
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