Tolzidan, there are many good benches with wood-only construction, so in principle, there are no reasons why your design won't work well. I have only the haziest idea of Japanese joinery, so am not clear on how those stretcher joints are made. From the drawing, they look like wedged through-tenons with a cap added to cover the projecting tenon & wedge - is that correct? One small point - it looks like the wedges are inserted from underneath on the long stretchers, on the drawing. For benches, it is usually recommended to have the wedges inserted from above so that if they shrink, they tend to self-tighten from any ensuing movement, rather than just fall out.
Cheers,
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IW | 
Thoughts about a wood only joinery design for a bench 
. I've been thinking about practicing Japanese joinery techniques and would like to make a bench using would only joinery techniques (except for the top which I'm planning on glueing up out of 8/4). I'm attaching a few sketchup snapshots and would like opinions on the concept (I don't have any of the dog holes, deadman placement or vise placement on this design yet).
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