Workbench Build #6: Mmmm, bacon

https://s3.amazonaws.com/lumberjocks.com/n4d44d5.jpg

I finished routing out dog holes. Here’s what the jig looked like clamped over one of the roughed-out holes:

Pretty straightforward, taking 1/16” or less off each side. A bit more work on the head recess, but way easier than hogging out the whole hole with the router.

The darker area on the top of the jig is wax.

And here’s what I mean by bacon:

Those two boards should be flat and fit together without gaps! Instead I have 3/4” warpage over 4”.

I was hoping that I’d be able to clamp them flat during glue-up. So I did a dry clamp using the existing portion of the top as a massive caul on one side:

A couple of clamps short, good excuse to get some more

Surprisingly, it was reasonably good. Not perfect, so I decided to mill the last (front) board and use that as a caul on the top side:

This also gives me my final top width – approximately 25 1/2”. Didn’t quite get the same yield on the jatoba boards as I did on the cherry, plus lost some more with resawing and trying to reflatten the two pieces of the dog board. Close enough to my target of 26”.

Put some glue on the puppy and let it sit in clamps for 48 hours. There are a couple of small gaps at the glue line, maybe on the order of 1/64”. None are large enough for the camera to pick up. I’ll probably try to get some epoxy in those gaps, mostly for aesthetic reasons.

After I released the clamps, the board stayed straight, so I’d consider this part of the process a success.

While I was at it, I also glued up the traveller block. I had enough from the cut off that I routed two holes, just in case I mess one up later.

Because the dog in the traveller needs to be sloped opposite to the dogs in the rest of the board, the easy way to do it is cut/route the dogs the same, and then simply turn the traveller around. That, however, means that the thin side of the two-part board will now be on the opposite side and there is the potential that the dog hole in the traveller will not quite line up with the rest of the dog holes. Not to mention that the glue line will switch sides and the grain direction will be reversed.

So OCD kicked in. I rebuilt the jig as a mirror image top/bottom and cut/routed the traveller so the dog hole will be sloped in the correct direction while the board maintains the “correct” orientation. Probably no one will ever notice that but me.

Source: LumberJocks.com

Workbench Build #6: Mmmm, bacon