Shoe Bench For The Mrs...
kryptix Nov 15, 2017
The full album can be found at: https://imgur.com/gallery/TD05Z
This bench that I made for my wife was also my entry into the Reddit 2x4 challenge. If you look in the album, I have a "before" picture showing the dollar store plastic shoe rack this is replacing. My kids are already climbing up and jumping off. I think the finish ended up going really well with the Cedar coat rack I made last month, and definitely about as well as I could hope for with cheap pine. Definitely lots of challenges and I don't think I'm going to make any real projects with pine again in the near future.
The Shou sugi ban finish did make it super hard though and its very solid with 250 pounds on it, so all in all very happy with the project.
2x4 (It was in the shop, unfortunately it was only 7'9" and 3 3/8 x 1 3/8)
Book matching resawing, SOOOOO much tension, had to do it in 3 cuts and had to shut down the saw 3/4 of the way through the cut when the wood tried to close on the blade.
Book matching resawing
Panel glueup for the seat
Keeping spare parts clamped to keep them work-ably flat.
flattening the panel
big check on the leg blanks had to be cut off.
stretcher blanks and shelf blank
layout of the legs, with book matching
leg + top combinations
dry fit with scraps from the checked end to widen, keeping this orientation to avoid wood movement issues since grain is in the same direction as the top.
glue up leg blanks
prepare to resaw shelves
shelf sticks
initial layout
ugh oh, my little shelf horizontal pieces are too short
and i guess I didn't saw off enough to get past the weak split parts, this happened 5 times during the build on the legs
half laps cut
more half laps
dado dry fit
and the dry fit blows it up.
glue up the shelves (I think this took 5 attempts before they stayed together, sort of)
These kept splitting the wood or failing for some other reason
more shelves
leg split again, this time during dry fitting a shelf.
more regluing of shelves, dry fit of bench
reverse angle, it looks like its coming together
split again (shot with the remaining scraps)
and split again so reglue again
more failures
and a dry fit of the shelf
finally one survived sanding (they fell apart sanding several times)
Final dry fit
Glueup of the shelves and base
Shou sugi ban on the seat (as a test) This was a bad idea, it warped the seat to a 3/8 cup on a 9/16th thick seat...
sanded
dyed
flattening the seat next to the glued base, seat panel was steamed and flattened with cauls, sorta worked.
took some scraps and added size to the feet under the lower shelf
dry fit the top
tried to brace the top with more scraps, one of the two blew up with the cupping pressure
high tension glueup of the seat to the stretchers
needed a good 2/3 of my clamps to close all the gaps since this crap loves to warp.
clamps
more clamps
that's all the scraps left
sanded
dyed
dyed next to the dollar store crap its replacing
first coat of arm-r-seal
several coats in
final look
different angle
one more angle
Before
After
Trying to decide which direction looks better
Not sure which side I want facing out...
final remains of the 2x4
