Thoughts about a wood only joinery design for a bench

All,

This is my first post in this forum so please be gentle :). 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).

Full View
Wireframe Full View
Wireframe Joinery Detail

Thanks for your consideration

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,

Hi Tolzidan, you couldn't do much better than to speak to Chris Hall over at his Japanese carpentry blog. Very helpful and lots of resources there. As Ian says it is entirely feasible to use joinery only.

Cheers
Michael

Ian, yes your correct those are wedge through tenons with the wedge in a cap I noticed from the drawing that it's hard to see but I also have a lip built into each of the stretchers for extra strength at the connection. Thanks for the suggestion about the wedge position I'll make sure to correct that before building this.

Michael, great suggestion thanks I'll make sure to ask Chris if he has any ideas. I have his PDFs (bought them from him a while back) and watch the Carpentry Way regularly but for some reason I wasn't thinking of him on this :doh:.