Thread: WIP: Split top bench

Got a router plane or maybe borrow one from someone?

I've tried to make the mortise and tenons work and haven't been able to get them right. The root of the issues is inexperience plain and simple, I've been looking around at guides and tips for making the joint as I want and found several areas to improve. I put some of the tips in to practice this morning and did a practice mortise and tenon which I'm very happy with, tenon went in on the first time without a fuss and does budge.

I've worked on flattening the tenon faces to get a good surface to glue more material to so I can recut them.

Edit to better explain:
I'm going to cut out the wood around the mortises and glue in a replacement, my attempts to fix the walls haven't gone well and I'm concerned about how chiseling will go because of this. My biggest concern is losing new marking lines in join lines from fixing the walls. I have a could of ideas on how I might do this, the first is to cut from the end of the table to just past the mortise and replace the about 600mm on each side. The second idea is to cut out just the area needed and replace that, and use a half lap to increase glue surface area making the replacement piece look like the image below.
Screen Shot 2021-05-26 at 11.12.06 am.png



Below are the key mistakes I've made during this process.

• Making the mortise width different to the width of the chisel. Originally the tenons were meant to be 19mm wide by my cutting and pairing was bad and I lost thickness, ended up cutting 16 - 17 mm wide mortises with a 13mm wide chisel causing the walls to be a mess.
• Tenon marking lines were not deep enough, when cutting the tenons I lost the lines
• Poor sawing of tenons. The tenon thickness was not uniform which made fitting hard and losing the lines meant I couldn't pair
• I need to work on pairing the tenon faces and mortise walls. I've been having a lot of issues with wood around the chisel lifting up causing divots so my walls end up hollow, even after sharpening. This is something I need to work on before attempting the benchtop again.

@Pippin88 I agree a router plane would probably make things easier and I'm considering getting one.

EDIT:
There are tools such as a router plane which would definitely make this easier but I have the tools needed already, it's the skills are lacking and learning is a big objective. I could use a router plane to make things like accurate tenons easier, but learning how to pair properly gets the result and (in my opinion) a fundamental woodworking skill.

For now I'm taking a step back from directly working on the bench to practice skills like pairing and mortise and tenons. I feel this will result in a better bench and is the 'best' approach.

Since my last update I haven't made significant tangible progress on the bench, mucking up the tenons on the legs ended up being a big drag in terms of motivation as attempts to fix didn't go as planned.

I have been practicing different joints to extend the legs but as I moved to the legs I struggled to get a fit good enough to be confident that the glue would hold. In particular I struggled to get the ends square, not having a vice played a big role here. So in the end I have given on up on original legs and purchased some 100x50 Vic Ash which I need to square up and laminate into legs a bit under 100x100

The image below is how I planned on extending the legs.
leg extend.jpg

My initial plan to fix the bench tops by patching the mortise holes did not yield results that I was happy with, I removed about 45mm of wood from each top and glued on new lot. I have also patched most of the knots in the bench-tops to make flattening easier.

I've decided to use Vic Ash from old roof battens to make the rails and styles instead of pine. This is mainly because the legs will now be Vic Ash so might as well make everything but the top in the same wood. The downside to this is the wood is needs a bit of work to get square as it's about 30+ years old, I'm hoping my local wood club opens soon so I can use their thicknesser to speed up the process.