Mini Moravian Bench Build Process
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Posted 1st August 2025
I should have quit for the day while I was ahead. The latter half of the afternoon has not gone well.
I started by lifting the bench-to-be up onto my bench and using some wedges, straight edges and a digital angle gauge to get it level in both axis:
I then used a machinists scribing block to scribe lines parallel to the bench top:
The upper line will be the bottom of the leg. The lower line was the original plan for the bottom of the leg but when I did one of the other legs I found I was scribing into air, so I moved the line up a bit and tried again.
I could then mark the position of the underside of the top (which will become a shoulder line if I do a sliding dovetail) using a metre rule and the angle gauge:
A quick sanity check with the sliding bevel showed the angle was what I expected:
The line got transferred around the ends in much the same way...
... and then I "joined the dots" for the line on the least accessible edge. Next, I added a second line parallel to the first but about 20 mm higher. If I do tapered sliding dovetails, that'll be the top of the dovetail.
With all that marked up, I decided to disassemble everything to make the legs a bit easier to work on. That was mostly going very smoothly until:
"Fiddlesticks", quoth he.
With the benefit of hindsight, I should have knocked each tenon out from the end, rather than supporting one leg and tapping the other to pull them apart. I also should have paid more attention to the note I wrote on that tenon:
Working on the assumption that there's not much I can do to repair that (I'd wholeheartedly welcome opinions to the contrary!), I had a look round the remaining Sycamore and this was the only piece I've got left that is (barely) big enough to remake that piece:
A bit of bandsawing and a lot of hand planing later and I've got it down to roughly the right size:
That knot you can see will be on the top edge (although it's not obvious in the picture, the new piece is only long enough at the bottom edge). I was unrealistically optimistically hoping it would get cut/planed away when I trimmed the off-cut down but alas it's there to stay. It'll end up a few millimetres inside the shoulder line.
Anyway, after I'd paid a small penance by hand planing that bit of sycamore, I decided it was sensible to stop before I did anything else stupid. I probably won't make it into the workshop tomorrow as as result of other commitments, so Sunday will have to be the day for remaking the cross-piece (unless anyone suggests a miracle way of repairing that broken piece).
That's it for today, I'm off to cry over a pint of Brains Dark.
Page 26 of 38
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