So today I was a bit under the weather (which is a polite way of saying that I was having a philosophical dispute with something I ate and was conducting a brexit poll of my own) and working from home (which is a polite way of saying that if you work in IT, being confined to where the king goes alone is not enough to get you out of work because we invented both the laptop and wifi). So over lunch I took the clamps off the core of the benchtop glueup to see would it immediately fall apart (because as we all know, a litre of titebond II regularly fails to hold wood together). Happily, the glue held the wood together. Slightly less happily, the glue also held some of the clamping blocks to the bench, but a few wallops with a mallet convinced them of the error of their ways.
Then I lifted the top onto the sawhorses to get a good look at it. Pro tip: if you have a dodgy tummy, don’t try to pick up a freshly-glued up benchtop and use your core abdominal muscles to pivot it to put it on sawhorses.
So a half-hour or so later and somewhat lighter, I went back to take a look at the benchtop, gave it a pass or two with a scrub plane to clean off the glue and let me see how bad it was and it’s… well, it’s not as bad as I was worried it might be.
The ends are aligned to within a millimeter or so on the far end, and only out by a few millimeters on this end, and I still have to cut somewhere around 100mm off the overall length anyway, so that’s grand. There are still one or two small gaps at what will be the the far back right of the benchtop when it’s done, almost a half-millimetre wide, but I can live with that. The area to the front where most of the work gets done is absolutely fine.
There is, however, a minor issue that I mentioned last time. This stuff is all rough white deal, and instead of being 2″x4″, it’s everything from 1.8″x3.9″ to 2″x4″ to 2.2″xScrewYouBuddy, so there wasn’t any way to clamp it to give me a flat face.
Hooooooooboy…
I’m going to have to refettle my scrub plane I think (well, it is a POS €12 #4)
I’m also probably going to drill out that huge knot in the fourth board from the left and call it a holdfast hole. Instead of a goddamnit-why-wasn’t-I-wearing-my-safety-glasses-I’ve-just-sprayed-myself-in-the-eyes-with-pine-knot-splinters-screw-you-knot-I’m-getting-rid-of-you hole, which is what it really will be.
Tags: bench, Woodworking
