Mini Moravian Bench Build Process

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While the garden table base is being glued together and I can't use the workbench, I thought I'd do the first bit of wood preparation for the bench. I said I was going to use powered assistance for the first step. That powered assistance will involve three power tools. The first one will be a tracksaw to roughly cut the planks up into more manageable sizes (with a bit of help from a Ryoba hand saw to minimise wastage). The second will be the bandsaw to rip the planks to width. They'll then get roughly hand-planed on one side until flat-ish and twist-free and then the thicknesser will be the last power tool for now at least.

Today I did the first job: using the tracksaw and the big Ryoba to break the two planks up into smaller pieces. This was done in the back garden on a couple of high trestles:

After gradually working my way through the two planks, I was left with this pile of pieces:

The one at the back will eventually become the two long stretchers. In front of that are two pieces (you can only see the top one in the photo) that will become the two bench top halves. In front of that at the bottom are two big pieces that will get cut up into eight smaller pieces and then laminated together in pairs to form the four legs. The pieces lying on top of the longer ones will eventually become the four shorter stretchers in the leg frames.

After all that chopping up, I was left some long barky strips off the edges of the board, a handful of bits with extremely short grain that'll only be useful as firewood and these three pieces (300 mm rule for scale):

The two bigger pieces have quite short grain, but I think I can probably use them for making boxes (and perhaps the wedges for the bench). The longer, thinner one will just go in the stash for future use unknown.

The good news is that it looks like I'll have enough wood to make everything I need without needing any more trips to Wentwood Timber. The bad news is that there isn't much excess (although all the pieces I've prepared are oversize in varying amounts to give me some room for adjustment) so if I make a complete mess of any of the pieces, I'll need to buy some more wood to make up the loss.

I am a hobbyist metalworker and woodworker. I work as an electronic design engineer and spend most of my working days in front of a computer so I enjoy having the opportunity to use my hands and make things in my spare time. I particularly enjoy making tools as I can then use them on other projects. This website showcases some of the things I've made.

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