With the completion of the dining table restoration, covered here previously, our original dining table has been moved outside to the verandah. It needed a couple of simple bench seats to make the most of the al fresco dining opportunities before it gets too cold.
The table was my first effort at furniture building back in about 1995. It's made from the old front door of my first house, with some recycled timber for the legs and rails. Amazingly, it has held together all these years considered the very basic tools and techniques I had as a recent graduate with a student debt and a mortgage.
In keeping with the table, the benches are made from recycled rimu (Dacrydium cupressinum) that I recovered from our last house. The timber was jointed and thicknessed down to size...
...then cut to length and mortised with my shop made morticing jig.
This jig is from a design by legendary furniture designer and builder Michael Fortune who recently ran a course at the Centre for Fine Woodworking that I attended.
The mortised legs and top rails have two floating tenons to each joint for a really strong connection. The design I came up with does not have stretchers, so relies on the glued joints for stability.
Lengths of floating tenon were thicknessed and then rounded over on the router table to the shape of the mortices. These were then cut up to length.
For the very simple look I was after, there are no lengthwise rails, so the leg 'A' frames are just glued and screwed to the seat planks. I made two spacing jigs to help with the assembly.
The seat planks and leg assemblies were then pre-drilled before being glued together.
The screw holes were plugged before the benches got three coats of an outdoor polyurethane.
I think the overall result is a nice clean look, and they will hopefully last at least as long as the table has!
The table was my first effort at furniture building back in about 1995. It's made from the old front door of my first house, with some recycled timber for the legs and rails. Amazingly, it has held together all these years considered the very basic tools and techniques I had as a recent graduate with a student debt and a mortgage.
In keeping with the table, the benches are made from recycled rimu (Dacrydium cupressinum) that I recovered from our last house. The timber was jointed and thicknessed down to size...
...then cut to length and mortised with my shop made morticing jig.
This jig is from a design by legendary furniture designer and builder Michael Fortune who recently ran a course at the Centre for Fine Woodworking that I attended.
The mortised legs and top rails have two floating tenons to each joint for a really strong connection. The design I came up with does not have stretchers, so relies on the glued joints for stability.
Lengths of floating tenon were thicknessed and then rounded over on the router table to the shape of the mortices. These were then cut up to length.
For the very simple look I was after, there are no lengthwise rails, so the leg 'A' frames are just glued and screwed to the seat planks. I made two spacing jigs to help with the assembly.
The seat planks and leg assemblies were then pre-drilled before being glued together.
The screw holes were plugged before the benches got three coats of an outdoor polyurethane.
I think the overall result is a nice clean look, and they will hopefully last at least as long as the table has!
