Mini Moravian Bench Build Process
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Posted 4th July 2025
I'm dreaming of a surface planer...
I was away on the motorbike last weekend and the evenings after work have been far too hot to consider going near the workshop, so today's the first day I've been out there since the last update.
The next job to do is get the planks planed on two faces. As I've said in an earlier post, I'm planning to do this by hand planing one face enough that it can serve as a reference for the second face. Then when the second face has been dealt with by the thicknesser I'll stick it back through upside down to sort out the first face. That's the minimum face hand planing I can get away with. It'd be much easier with a surface planer as I'd just do the first face with that and the opposite one with the thicknesser.
I haven't got very far yet!
I started today by getting the planks on the bench to have a look at. Some of them are quite long compared to the bench, so they could be quite challenging to deal with if I don't cut them down at all:
The stretchers in particular are quite long and will stay long so I'll just have to deal with them, but (with the exception of the top pieces) most of the others can be pre-shortened. I wasn't sure whether to do that though until I'd put them on the bench for a decent look. As you can perhaps see in this photo, there's a bit of an end-to-end bow in this plank (which is destined to become four leg halves):
If I tried to plane that bow out I'd lose a lot of thickness, so I decided it was best to chop the board in half before planing:
The plank was also slightly bowed the other way so I figured I rip it down the middle. Now these planks are quite thick (about 50 mm). Ripping all of them in half sounded to me like it was getting perilously close to resawing (okay, perhaps a bit of an exaggeration), so I decided to rip them with the bandsaw. There isn't much space in my workshop in case you haven't gathered (hence not having a surface planer). To use the bandsaw for long material I either have to move a lot of things out into the garden (including the motorbike and one of my benches). Alternatively, I can sometimes get away with some careful manoeuvring and blocking off the metalworking end:
If I clear the metalwork bench and get the alignment right (neither of which I did this time!), the bench can act as a board catcher. Failing that, they drop onto the little horizontal bandsaw as one of the stretchers did here:
To be honest it's not that bad really: the planks are light enough that I can keep them horizontal (by pushing down on the near end) until the cut has finished and then gently lower the left one before reaching round to grab it.
Having been cut in half lengthways, the leg boards were a lot easier to rip:
That left me a big pile of chopped up boards plus five potentially useful off-cuts, which got labelled with species before moving them out of the way:
With the 8 leg halves, the four short cross bars, the two long stretchers and the two big top pieces, I'm feeling rather daunted by the prospect of dealing with all of this (hence the dream of a surface planer):
Chopping the boards up dealt with quite a lot of the bow in the boards. The top boards seem pretty flat despite their length, so that's good. Unfortunately, the long stretchers have quite a big bow along the length (this measurement is in the middle of the 1.4 metre plank):
That much bow means that if I plane it completely flat, the maximum thickness I'd get out of what is currently a 50 × 83 mm plank would be about 36 mm (and that doesn't leave any allowance for actually planing it smooth). I guess I can probably cope with that as long as I orient it right to make sure there's enough thickness for a tenon-in-a-tenon (the wedged tenon in the end of the stretcher). Alternatively I could live with the bow, but I suspect that will make life much more difficult as the tenon shoulders at each end of the plank should be parallel with each other and that's not easy if the faces aren't flat.
Anyway, the forecast suggests it'll be a bit cooler this weekend, so hopefully that'll help with the enormous planing job I've got to do!
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