Mini Moravian Bench Build Process
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Posted 5th July 2025
Once I'd cooled down enough to carry on, it was time to get the thicknesser out. For anything but the shortest boards, there isn't space in the workshop for that, so the first thing to do was wheel the trolley (with wings!) out into the garden (with a little bit of assistance from Carolyn as it's flipping heavy - I can do it on my own but it gets a bit precarious at times). I could then feed all the boards through with the planed face down, then when the upper face was clean, flip them over and plane until the hand-planed face was fully smooth (or at least as smooth as a thicknesser will manage).
That all went mostly very well, except that I stupidly put one of the leg halves through the wrong way up on the first go, so the face I'd hand-planed got thicknessed parallel with the wonky face. That one had to go back into the garage to be hand-planed again and then I carefully marked all the reference faces of all the boards to make sure I didn't do it again!
I did the boards in batches (legs first, then cross-pieces, then stretchers, then top pieces). That way I could take the minimum amount of wood of each "set" while making sure all the pieces in a set were the same thickness.
It really didn't take long until they were all done:
Close-up of the pile of leg halves.
Once that was all done, I measured all the pieces:
- Top pieces: 48 × 170 × 1220 mm
- Stretchers: 40 × 80 × 1400 mm
- Leg halves: 47 × 70 × 720 mm
- Upper cross-pieces: 47 × 90 × 400 mm
- Lower cross-pieces: 47 × 90 × 590 mm
I'm sure most people reading this won't be interested in those dimensions, but it seemed sensible to write them into this post in case I lose the piece of paper they're written on!
The next job will be to throw those dimensions at the CAD model and see what they look like. It seems likely that some of the pieces will need to go through the thicknesser again once I've decided what size I want them to be, but we'll see. Eventually everything will also get hand planed again to get rid of the machine marks, but not until the size is finalised.
I'm really pleased to have got this far today. I thought it would take me a lot longer to get the first faces planed and to be ready for the thicknesser. Depending on how long the CAD playing takes tomorrow, I might get them re-thicknessed and then next weekend I can start thinking about edge-planing and perhaps even starting the joinery (although if the weather forecast stays as it is at the moment, it might be too hot to do anything at all next weekend).
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