My Bench
Posted by Nathaniel.
I just [almost completely] finished my bench over the weekend so I want to show off a little bit. Like all of the other furniture that I’ve built, it’s very heavy and could support a good fraction of the house if there was a significant collapse.
OOh, ahh. Ignore the staining on the wood that I didn’t take the time to sand all the way out. There’s going to be a cushion on it anyway.
No, the top isn’t curved, it just looks that way in the picture. Notice the cool green tones in the wood. (It’s Tulip wood.) You can also notice that all of the pieces of wood are a full two inches thick even after planing and sanding. Also, just to be cool, the top and legs were originally all one piece of wood. Last, the hole’s going to get covered up, don’t worry.
The bolt that you saw the head of before ends in this other hole. The entire part of the center board is to make sure that the legs don’t topple sideways. I’m not going to turn it on its side and jump on it, but it should be pretty sturdy. I put in half 1″ oak dowels just because I thought they’d spread the force a little bit and keep the washers on the bolts flat.
An interior view showing how the top is connected to the legs and center. When you look around you can find cool little thingies, and the “desk top connectors” definitely fit in the cool category. They’re slightly less than 1/4 inch thick steel, sunk slightly into center board and legs. There are 10 of them anchored into the bottom boards with 2″ screws and into the top with 1″ screws. Again, this thing won’t come apart easily.
Finally, I have a bunch of these bolt-hole covers to cover up all the holes. They’re decorative enough to be nice, but not so fancy that they won’t look good on the bench. I chose this rather than plugs so I can tighten up the bolts in the future if they need it. I need to let the poly dry for a week to get up to its final hardness and then put on a few coats of wax, so the covers will go on next weekend once I’m done.
August 15th, 2005 at 11:24 pm Using
Oh yeah, the notch in the second-to-the-last picture is for the tie on the cushion so it can be held in place with something more than just gravity.
August 24th, 2005 at 7:19 pm Using
As we discussed, tulip poplar is really a nice/easy wood to work with. “Pine that doesn’t suck” a friend of mine said.
August 24th, 2005 at 7:23 pm Using
Yeah, now I just wish that I had sanded it more to get some of the staining out. The problem was that the top is a 14.5″ board and I only had access to a 12″ planer. So I did a lot of sanding just to get it flat and was too bored of sanding to get all the stains out.
Maybe sometime this winter I’ll just take the belt sander to it again.