Sawbench build

Tonight I revisited the "$5.87 sawbench"  and almost finished building one in a single session using only a very basic set of hand tools (cross-cut panel saw, carcasse saw, flush saw, jack plane, 1" chisel, 3/8" chisel, brace, 2 clamps). The only thing left to do is to finish chopping the decorative curves on the long brace, flush the short braces and cut the legs to my exact dimensions. It will basically be a ten minutes job tomorrow evening.

The most shocking aspects of tonight's build are that I can finally let the carcasse saw do its job without interference and that I have become very fast at chopping cheeks/tenons/notches. I found out that I had a far better result cutting shoulders if I didn't actually pay attention to the sawing after establishing a proper knife wall, starting with no weight on the saw and letting gravity do its job. For the cheeks/notches, where the tutorial above use a saw followed by a router plane to remove the waste for the braces, I simply chop the waste away with a very sharp 1" chisel then pare the last 1/16" with the same. The result is a perfectly true and smooth joint in less than a minute usually... even when there's a knot in the way.

Another modification I had to make to the instructions was replacing the cut nails by screws... I would love to use cut nails but they are unfortunately not available around here and I have been unable to find a British seller willing to ship them across the channel so far.

I will probably to build the matching second saw bench in one session soon. I will then possibly make the updated stacking design before deciding which pair will be given to a colleague interested in starting woodworking.

On the appliance front, I updated my shooting board this weekend to include a miter stop... hand cutting the angled dado was way easier and faster than I expected. As I still had a fairly big off-cut on the floor and some 3-ply laying around, I also made a paring board which was very handy for tonight's sawbench braces. The next appliance in the list would be the sloyd style bench hooks.