Engineer On The Loose

Here is the original blog post over at Lumberjocks.com

Shoe Bench 8

Got the clamps off and now it’s time to clean up the glue joints and prep the surfaces for finish.

First thing to do was remove the clamps, flip the bench on it’s side, and plane all of the joints even.

After leveling the divider joints next came the ends. Bringing the half blind dovetails and through mortises level.

After the the ends and sides were level and smooth I ran around all of the corners, exterior and interior, with a hand held router and an eighth inch round over bit.

After that it was planing the seat smooth as glass.

Here is the original blog post over at Lumberjocks.com

Shoe Bench 6

Ok, here comes the interesting part, not the hardest part, but the most interesting part. Getting all of the joints to line up and come together snug without a lot of slop was a bit of a trick. The bench has 22 sliding dovetails, two ends with half blind dovetails, and 8 through wedged tenons. They all have to line up pretty close or things wont come together square.

I started with the half blind dovetails on the ends.

This gave me the inside dimension from the base of the dovetails down the side to the shelves.

I used a Porter Cable 4212 Dovetail Jig to cut the half blind dovetails and the sliding dovetail dados. Here is a picture of the jig setup to cut a sliding dovetail dado.

The Porter Cable is a pretty common jig, not too fancy or flexible but it cuts a standard dovetail with little setup or trouble. It can also cut through dovetails, sliding dovetails, dados, finger joints, and probably a few other joints if you’re creative, for a reasonable price and not too much fiddling.

After cutting the half blind dovetails on the end boards I setup and cut the sliding dovetail dados on the seat and shelves. I marked the edge of the dovetail dado referenced from the end of the self. I then transferred the mark to the mating shelf to make sure the marks were in the exact same place, and then used the mark to line up with the sliding dovetail slot on the dovetail jig.

To cut the dados I setup two routers, one with a 1/2 inch straight bit to hog out the bulk of the dovetail slot and one with the dovetail bit.

Obviously the dovetail has to be cut in a single pass at full depth. To ease the burden on the dovetail bit I first hogged out the bulk of the dado with a straight bit set just a smidge shallower than the final dovetail depth.

After that I just slid the shelf until the layout lines lined up with the edge of the dado slot on the jig and cut the dovetail dado in two passes, one pass with the straight bit and one pass with the dovetail bit.

The through wedge tenons turned out to be a bigger hassle than I had anticipated. Getting the through mortises clean and square without too much of a wedge angle turned out to be too much for me. The mortises turned out too big, the tenon wedge slots are uneven and at an angle. All in all not my best work.

I hogged out the through mortise with a forstner bit and “squared” up the mortise with a chisel. Squared is putting it politely.

I then chisled the angle for the wedge. It turns out the wedge angle needs to be pretty small. The tenon will only spread so much, in this case “so much” was not enough. I’m confident the tenons are wedged and are not coming out, but they did end up leaving a gap on the top and bottom of the mortises.

After that fiasco the rest was pretty easy. The dividers are all the same so I could cut the dovetails production style on my router table. Get it setup once and crank out all 4 cuts per divider.

I used the same dovetail bit moved from my portable router to my router table. I set the bit height to the same depth as the sliding dovetail dado. After a couple trial runs I set the fence offset to end up with a snug fit of the dividers into the dovetail dados.

Here is the original blog post over at Lumberjocks.com

Shoe Bench 4

If you download and try to use the Sketchup design from the previous blog entry a couple of things changed in the final implementation. First I changed the dados to sliding dovetails and the through dovetails on the ends to half blind dovetails.

One of the design constraints I self imposed was to use only wood on wood with glue to assemble the bench, no metal fasteners. I decided on dovetails for the ends, sliding dovetails for the dividers, and wedged through tenons to fix the shelves.

The design uses wedged through tenons to hold the shelves

I figured with the through tenon end grain showing I probably want to use through dovetails for the ends. The layout and dimensions in the design are sized for the bench ends to have enough material to cut a through dovetail.

When I made the ends I decided to use half blind dovetails, I just think it looks better, so the ends are too big in the drawing.

You’ll either have to fix it in the drawing or modify the ends on the fly like I did.

The second change, from dados to sliding dovetails, does not require a drawing or material change. The sliding dovetails are the same depth as the dados so the cut list remains the same. Just cut a dovetail dado instead of a square dado in the shelves and cut dovetails on the divider boards.

Here is the original blog post over at Lumberjocks.com

Shoe Bench 2

So now I know I want a shoe bench, the next step is to see what I can find. I like to make things but if it turns out I can find the perfect bench a dime a dozen that drops right in, I’m gonna buy it. And if I don’t find one for a dime, well at least I’ll get some ideas about what to make. The first place to look of course is the internet, a quick google search for shoe bench and shoebench turns up quite a few possibilities. Unfortunately most of them are too much money, too much ugly, too much low quality, too much the wrong size, and just too much wrong.

So I’m gonna make my own (you probably guessed that part being that this is a blog on lumberjocks).

So given that I’m gonna make it myself it’s time to look for some ideas. It looks like shoe benches come in mostly two styles, the shelf style and the cubby style

And of course no search would be complete without searching lumberjocks

There is this one and this one and this one and this one and this one.

All excellent benches, some close to what I’m thinking about, some not as much.

I’m definitely leaning to the cubby style bench. I know my kids, if I build it, they will fill it. If I build a shelf style bench it might keep the shoes off the floor but the shoes will end up tossed on the shelf in a mixed up pile, not on the floor but not much better. A cubby style it is.