Build a Traditional Sawbench for Hand Tool Woodworking

[Music] hi I'm Christopher Schwarz and I'm the editor of Popular Woodworking magazine and one of the most popular classes that I teach on weekends is how to build a saw bench which is this little device down here and so we thought it would be a good idea to take this class and make a DVD of the process of making this essential piece of hand tool shop equipment but the problem is is that on DVD sometimes I think I look and act like a lab animal so we decided to do something a little different and instead of just shooting me building this saw bench we decided to do it with a class of 10 people so for the next hour or so you're going to be following along with me and the 10 students as we build this project almost entirely by hand and I bet you that at least once Megan will get bleeped ok this is what we're building today and this is a traditional English style sawing bench you know also called a saw bench some of people call them more - seen benches but actually more - seen benches are a little different that's another class saw benches are tuned in a very special way to work with a handsaw and with a rip saw and you are going to make your saw bench for you and when you get home using the instructions provided you're gonna make a second one because they always come in pairs and so this direction will directions will show you how to build its mate now some benches are absolutely genius I think and they are genius because of their height for one and their height is directly below your kneecap so let's measure let's have a volunteer okay so every saw bench is a different height so here we have this saw sorry don't take it personal we're gonna make his about 20 inches high which seems pretty low because mine is nope actually you're sometimes could be higher than mine you have bigger what what bone is that I don't know that bone is bigger than my bone so we're going to make it that specific height and the reason it's that specific height is so that you can use it effectively the genius thing about saw benches is that you use no clamps when you're working is that this knee clamps down and this knee controls the motion laterally of the board so that when you're sawing and bringing the saw closer to you is that it can't move because it's up against this knee and it's held down by this knee no clamps very genius now the other thing about the saw bench that's great is that it is tuned to your body and your height and your saw and remember the saw blade is about this length most saws are used when cross cutting at a 45 degree angle so at a 45 degree angle I can't hit the floor ever and at a 45 degree angle I can't over I pull my arm out of its socket I can't pull the saw out of the kerf if I'm sawing properly so that is is you know the special genius of these things now they're not just used for sawing and we use them all the time in pairs for assembly we assemble cabinets on them we assemble you know panels on them there they're used for just about everything but traditionally they're also used for sitting on them for eating your lunch and I you think I'm crazy but that is always mentioned in the in the old books so they're a very handy place to sit and when you do make them you have to make sure that other members of your family don't claim them for their own because they're also you know could they'll use them as step stools and and all the like this design has evolved over several generations to make it well you know lighter and lighter and use it fewer and fewer materials and that we're down to using it basically a 10 foot long 2 by 6 creates this and it this is the handy way to to carry it under your tucked under your arm and we have only one stretcher here instead of two stretchers on earlier generations so that when you're ripping you don't score the the stretchers the other feature that a lot of people ask about is the ripping notch well it's just a little bird's mouth here and that has that is for a lot of different things but mostly it's for you know ripping thin materials for supporting it or when you need to make really short rips you don't want to you know cut into your into your saw bench so you do the short rip right here but I use this a lot of different ways sometimes I will take it and wrap it up against my my bench top and then you can actually put a whole frame and panel entryway door wedged into this and playing down the edge so it will fit inside its jams I'll take cabinets and put cabinets on top of there and you know then playing the tops of the cabinet's off because the plat cabinet will be raised up against my my bench I'll put a table leg in here when I'm trying to lower the table apron down to the top I mean you'll find all sorts of crazy crazy uses for it and so this is what we're going to build and we're gonna build it using all the special forms of saw cuts that we're gonna learn about today and tomorrow and so by the the end of it you will have learned a lot more about sawing and then produce the thing that will make sound easier for you when you get home so I'm gonna show you how to mark the parts and then we're going to start off by cutting the angled notches on the legs which looks like the hardest part of the whole thing but it's actually cake now that we know a little bit about sawing this isn't supposed to be a class in hand tool joinery but you can't do a hand tool project without learning a little bit about how to approach or work in a proper and hand-tool manner because it is almost the exact opposite of the way you approach a project when you build it by machine when you build a project by hand every piece of wood has different surfaces that mean different things and have different things done to them so when you have a surface in or a board in the hand tool world is you're going to have a surface that is going to be your reference surface you can make all at your datum surface you know there are all different sorts of names for it but it is the surface that has to be true has to be flat because it is going to be interconnected with other parts of your project that means for example like if it were a case side the inside of the case side that has the dados and the rabbits and the grooves it has to be perfectly flat but it it doesn't have to look good then you know unless you're capturing people inside who are going to see your workmanship inside your cabinet but so this surface needs to be flat but it can it can look terrible the outside surface has to look good but it doesn't have to be flat and so that is going to be the show face so every piece of wood has to have one reference surface and one show surface sometimes they're the same surface as you're gonna see as we move through this project and sometimes not so if we look at the first thing we're gonna deal with on this saw bench is we're gonna deal with the legs and so we need to true up our legs so that we can create the joinery on them to interconnect with the top and with this stretcher down here so if we look at this piece of leg I am what I'm going to do is I'm going to choose the ugliest surface to be my reference surface because this surface is on the inside of the leg is what I'm going to put my joinery on so that it relates to this notch in the top so I'm looking here on this these are both fairly ugly surfaces but I determine that this is the MOE Doug Lee and so this surface I'm going to get as flat and true as I can with my planes and then I'm going to make a mark on it like this and that mean that mark means that this is the reference surface then I'm going to have to have a reference edge on this and as we know we have this stretcher coming in here and so this surface needs to be true and 90 degrees to this surface so what you're going to do is you're going to say okay if this is the top of my leg then this surface is going to be my show surface this surface is going to be my reference face and this surface is going to be my reference edge this surface doesn't matter so much you know it's got a little bit of mating up here to do but it's mostly just you know all for show and this service is all for show this doesn't have to be flat at all just has to look good so what I want you to do the first thing I want you to do is to make this flat with your planes as flat as you can get it and then make the adjacent surface 90 degrees to it using using your planes now I will do this with a jointer plane but these surfaces are so small that I think you can do it with just about any plane would work so just put it up against a stop and so then I'm after I clean up the machining marks I'm going to check it with my edge of my plane make sure that I didn't create a hollow in it or hump and so this is my reference surface so what I'm going to do is I'm going to do this and this line is going to point to my reference edge so now I'm going to dress my reference edge the dangers of working against a single point stop and then I'm going to first check that along its length to make sure I didn't create a banana and then I'm going to check it for square the stock of the square goes against your reference surface so if this has to touch the place that has the mark and then I'm going to compare it all along the length to make sure that's 90 degrees this corner is high a little bit so I'm going to take shaving there and then check it again and that looks good and then I'm just going to make a mark here and this mark meets up with this mark so now I know that this is my reference surface face on the inside my reference edge on the inside and I can dress these other two surfaces just so they look good I don't even have to check them just remove the machine marks so don't spend a lot of time on these too just clean them up okay so that's what we're gonna do first so let's go grab our legs and make them fly [Music] the leg notch is at a 10 degree angle with a 10 degree little bird's mouth in it and that seems like it would be something very difficult to cut and it would be on a table saw it we'd have to make a jig and make a jig to make a jig to make a 10 degree by 10 degree cut but with a handsaw it's gonna be very simple for us and the leg notch is what controls display of the legs and makes the whole saw bench more stable so what we're going to do is this is what the leg notches is going to look like in the end and the first thing we're going to do is we're gonna set one gauge to half an inch and we're going to mark the top of the endgrain with that gauge then we're going to you to reset that gauge or use a second gauge and Mark this shoulder at inch and a half and then the third thing you're going to do is you're going to take your bevel gauge you're going to come over to my saw bench or if you have if you can just instinctively you know get ten degrees in your head which I don't recommend set your bevel gauge to ten degrees off of ninety and and then then keep it lock there lock it tight because this is going to guide you through the rest of the project and then then guard it with your life so let's go about making that the first thing you can you have to do before you can make this mark those you need to decide what is the top and what is the bottom of your legs and how are your legs going to be oriented and the way I always do this is with a cabinetmakers triangle a cabinetmakers triangle that you scroll on the top will always point towards the front of the top way which is where the top of the triangle is so that's going to point to where the bird's mouth ripping notch is and you're always going to know what is you know the inside out side front and back and if you do this you market correctly then all of your reference marks should be on the insides of these and everything should match up made up nicely too because these surfaces are supposed to be flat so now I know if I pick this leg I know instantly that this is the inside edge and so I'm going to take my half inch gauge and Mark the top of the shoulder the top of the cheek actually with this and then I've got an inch and a half gage and I'm going to mark the shoulder then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take my gauge here and let's see if I get this to work like I want it to and then I'm going to use a knife to go ten degrees off of my shoulder line at the top so I'm dropping the knife into the little knife line that carried over on the corner and then I'm going to turn the gage around and I'm going to go ten degrees down so I'm going to put it up on the shoulder line that I cut and it's ten degrees down when we fill that in with a little pencil so you can actually see what this looks like so that's what it looks like if you want to come up here and take a close look and then I'm gonna repeat that on the other side so it's 10 degrees down like this and then 10 degrees down like that it looks like a little checkmark and then I'm gonna do the same on the other side make these with a knife knife cuts are far more accurate than a pencil line and manipulate your gauge your bevel gauge here so that you have the maximum amount of bearing surface on it on the top of the leg and when you knife in the joints it's much better to use you know four or five really light cuts than one mighty stroke and then we're just going to darken that in so that we have a little more visible line since none of us are getting younger or getting better eyesight okay now we're gonna saw this like a tenon cheek so you want to put it in your vise in your face vise and you want the waist facing you you want to get use to that configuration don't sometimes put the waist facing the bench and sometimes the lace facing you because you you need to train your body that the waist should face you and that's the easy thing to think of and the easy way to remember it now when you saw a tenon cheek you are wanting to saw across two dimensions at one time to make it more accurate it's much harder if we came in from the top to just saw straight down from the top and down to the bottom to be accurate all the time it would be it's far more accurate to to advance on two lines at the same time that's the traditional way to cut a tenon cheek the problem is that we need to start this saw on the corner and starting the saw in the corner is tough because you know we have a triangle here and our teeth are a triangle and so instead of cutting each other they're gonna want to you know kiss and and spoon for lack of a better word so we need to do something about that and we also need to make it so that the saw will start accurately in in hand tools and an especially sign you're gonna find that the better you start the better you'll end so if we start right we'll end right the way you do that is what Robert Waring calls a second-class saw cut and this is where we create a knock using a chisel that's going to guide our saw as we begin the cut so here's how you do it you take you take it and you put the bevel towards the waist come up and I'm just going to drop it in that knife line on the corner and then I'm going to press down a little bit don't do it with a mallet and then I'm going to come around the same chisel and I'm going to cut or pair out a little triangular shaped piece of waste now what we've done here is we've created this V notch like this and this is our tenon this is our keeper side so we have this fence that is going to prevent the saw blade from leaping over into the part that we want to keep and we have this slope that is going to encourage the saw to push down to ride down right up to what we want to keep and then the third bonus is we've created a flat place where we can start the saw so it's easier to start so these notches are very handy and this is what it's called a second-class saw cut and second-class saw cuts are used when accuracy is paramount but the final appearance of the joint is not you know it's not a show face or a show surface so I'm going to use all my sawing tricks I'm going to hold the saws loosely as possible I'm gonna take all the weight off of the toe and I'm gonna begin this cut so here I am right at the toe and I'm just going to gently start with a couple strokes forward and then after I get a couple strokes forward what I'm going to do is I'm going to start sawing down this end grain to create a sort of a starting notch that's about an eighth of an inch deep all the way across the end so here we got it and I'm going to do that by blowing on the line so I can see the line and I'm using my thumb as a fence and I am moving the my thumb forward as I advance on this line the very accurate workers way now as soon as I get to the other side and are about an eighth of an inch deep then I can begin tipping the saw down this way and I can begin to worry less about the way the saw is tracking here because it's going to follow the path of least resistance which is the little kerf that you created and you can focus your energy and attention on following this line once I hit my baseline turn it around and the saw is going to follow the path that I created on the last cut and when I put my baseline on both sides then I'm done and now we want to cut shoulder the shoulder is at a 10 degree angle which would be a difficult cut to jig up but it's no big deal for us because you know if we can see the line then we can cut it so I'm going to secure this to my bench with a holdfast if you have a bench hook this is a good place to use a bench hook but I always like to really secure it down tight probably should have a pad or something under here but you know this is the reference surface it won't show so I'm not going to get to here'd over about it now this surface is a show surface not really search service but it's a critical surface you know it's on the inside but the shoulder line is going to determine exactly how the leg is going to mate with the top and so we really want to take some care so we're not just gonna go hacking away at it with a saw we're going to do what is called a first-class saw cut and this is also a robber wearing trick and you want to create an environment that will allow you to start very very easily on that line and so what I'll do is you take a wide chisel the widest chisel you have you drop it into your line and then either with a pine you can just use your hand but in in hard Oaks you're gonna use a mallet and you just give it a couple big knocks to deepen that line a little bit so and then you come back with your chisel and you pair out a little notch so what I've done is that once again I've created that V like we did on the second-class saw cut but I've done it all the way across the shoulder line here and so now my saw can just drop into that little notch and and and start without a lot of jumping around and the other beautiful thing is if this were a show surface like the outside of a tenon then we will have already made a very nice clean shoulder cut but with a chisel instead of a saw so we've already cut the shoulder so the first class saw cut is actually a chisel cut so I'm going to take a crosscut saw with fine relatively fine teeth this is this is a sash and I'm just going to drop it in and that's it we've got a little cleanup here to do at the shoulder with the chisel but that's gonna nest just fine this waist piece where I started which isn't exactly the right angle is going to get cut away so don't worry about it there's extra length here so the top of the tenon doesn't have to be absolutely perfect at the top of the leg any questions okay I'd like to do that on all four legs and then we'll come back and we're gonna learn how to true these up if you're messing up because you will I did first time when you track your waste pieces fall off save those those four pieces are the best clamping call you'll have when you clamp these legs up [Music] first thing is after you finish these leg cuts is you want to save these guys because these guys are you're clamping cauls as I mentioned before don't don't let other people steal them off your bench put your initials on them guard them with your life if you must because you'll you'll thank me for this later okay we have these notches cut but you know we're all human and so these notches might be you know wonky in some way and they can be wonky in that this one has a little nuttiness up here at the top because I started down straight instead of at an angle and but it's gonna be cut away so I'm not too worried about this area up here because this is an inch and a half long and our top is only an inch and 3/8 thick so this is going to probably get cut away but as I put the two legs together as they're going to be in together is I want these this surface to be I want to all be in the same plane and I don't want any bumps or high spots because that'll interfere with the way that this matches with the notch in the top so the first thing I'm going to do is I want to try to get the higher surfaces basically flat so that I can then true them both together and you know you could just go at it with a shoulder plane right now if you wanted to but everybody who does this at the beginning they just make like this wacky curvy banana thing and so I've been trying to come up with a way to make this process more straightforward and easier to do and what I kind of came up with is I want you to take one of the hand screw clients that we have we have a whole stack of them back here if you didn't bring one put them together so the jaws closed and then take your hand plane and plane it so that these are dead flush because sometimes you know they'll be a little bit off but you want these two surfaces to be in the same plane with these two with the bottom two surfaces flat against your bench and then you want to take the errant knotty leg in question and you want to put it so that you have the high spot above the jaw and the low spot the lowest edge flush to the jaw on the other side so here I have a high spot here and this is completely flush so I know that if I take a chisel and use this as a guide is that it'll remove this high these high pieces like this down to my low spot over there and so what I will end up having is at least a coplanar surface it might not be coplanar with this yet but it will be you know just it will be flat and then you'll have much better luck with your shoulder plane and cleaning it up so we're gonna do that and this once I get this flat there we go once I get this flat then I can even come in and true up the shoulder if I want to by putting this flat across here is this is ninety degrees even though this was ten degrees off of the face of the surface it's 90 degrees to this surface so this wants to be a straight corner so by running the shoulder plane in there we can then clean out the junk in the corner and fix any errors that you had when you made this little ten degree cut easy peasy I hate that expression the next thing is once we have them basically Trude up then we can clamp them together like this and this is how they're going to appear beat together and I can see that you know this I got flat and this I got flat but this is lower than this so what I want to do is get myself a dog and clamp them up and then work on the lower one and bring the higher one down to it by using the lower one as a reference surface for the back part of the sole and then as soon as the plane iron touches this surface I know that they're they're coplanar and I can check that by using the edge of the plane as a reference and I still have some work to go here so this brings them into the same surface same plane and then if the shoulders don't line up once I get them in the same plane I can come here and bring the shoulders into alignment too so with the power of the chisel and the power of the shoulder plane we can fix all the mistakes we made while sine a little more to go but that's essentially at any questions did you get tear out the back here yeah you'll get a little spell Qing that's what that's called when you pull and you you you come off the outside rim this is the it's the British word for blow out that's what Americans call it very American word spittoon and we have to say like that smoking yeah you're gonna get that and the way to relieve it is that after everything is dressed up and and coplanar then just plain this side this edge and get rid of the spell chain you could we could come in there with a chisel and plane or make a nice little chamfer relief chamfer but then we could also knit doilies for all our tools you know and we can also do that so you know I'm an American so I'm going to live with my spell chain and and then plane it away before I mark my just on my time so that's how we're going to clean it up and I'm gonna I'm almost done here so when I'm done I'll come around and give you all a hand [Music] [Music] but we're going to we're gonna cut this ripping knotch right now before we get any more work on the top and I want you to do this because I want you to start moving into getting a taste of the bigger saws you know we've used a lot of the the joinery saws and the back saws but you know sometimes panel saws are used at the bench and so this is our chance to sort of get a taste of that and how they feel different from the back saws so we're gonna lay out the ripping notch and the ripping notch is three-quarters of an inch in from the edge so take your combination square and Mark it in three-quarters of an inch in and then it's five inches deep so find the center line which will be five inches down two and a half inches in mark a little X and then on both sides of your work mark your line like that and then take a ripping panel saw this one has a rip tooth it's a seven point and seven point is about right I guess I mean I wouldn't want to they don't make a lot of finer rip saws so what I'm gonna do is it's a little different with a handsaw or a panel saw than it is with a back saw as you begin this cut with a few backward strokes to try and kind of make that second class saw cut notch so these make their own knotch so we're going to begin there at the corner and I'm gonna work [Music] see my line I want to cut it then what I'm gonna do is so I'm following this line as best I can down the front of my board and then I'm going to use that line to follow it on the back of the board so I'm seeing this and making a nice notch and then it's easier for me to follow that line down there and then when I hit the bottom again a minute angle and then do the same and then do the other side same way but getting that started with a few dragging price that's the challenge with these when use light downward pressure and when I'm starting these especially on the bench I'll sometimes use the back teeth you know usually we start with the toe with a back saw but with these this is stiffer up here you have the tote stiffening things up kind of like a back and so when I'm working at the bench of the panel saw I'll definitely start up at the back teeth and then go into using longer strokes then the other saws best friend is the rasp and you can break those edges and rasp only cut on the forward push you don't drag them back like this because that dulls the teeth and then you can merrily clean that not [Music] [Laughter] [Music] until you're happy [Music] No [Music] now we need to cut the notches in the top that receive the notches that we cut on the legs the reason we cut this little birds mouth is so that it will resist all the downward force when you put your whole weight on it you can Park several thousand pounds on these and they won't they won't crush Kelly mailer just put fifteen hundred pounds on his pair of saw benches that we built when he was getting that stock ready for his bench class and so that this little bird mouse notch was a pain in the butt is is really a good thing so the first thing we need to do with our top is we need to decide which surface is the show face and which surface is the reference surface the reference surface is the underside so it needs to be the ugly surface and so we need to dress that side flat then we need to dress the long edges 90 degrees to the reference surface and then the top this needs to look good so we're gonna address that with our planes and which is I've just finished up here and while you were working don't need to see that again and then I scrawled a cabinetmakers triangle on the show surface here's my mark on the on the reference surface just so I can remember you know which side should which face should go up so what I want to do is I want to place these legs in position where they're going to go to use the legs to mark out the notches we can measure it all but it would be wrong so what we're gonna do is we're gonna take our top piece put the reference surface to the front of the bench top and then I use a leg to help me you know get it so that the top is in there and projecting equally all the way across reasonably so and then I want to mark out the outside edge of the knotch and then I'm going to mark the inside edge of the knotch using my leg that way it'll be banging on whatever it is so the knotch begins four and a half inches in from either end so I'm just going to take my combination square and with a knife this has to be knifed in mark that a few lighter strokes like I said earlier is better than one mighty stroke you're much less likely to follow the grain with your knife if you do it that way so I'm gonna use my other legs to prop this up at the right angle at the ten degrees and simply shift the the legs forward and back until this sits flat so I'm just gonna then sit it flat move them in and it holds it for you you don't have to awkwardly you know balance it while your knife and then I'm going to take my knife and with the flat face I'm going to press position the flat face so it is facing my leg and I'm going to drop that in my knife line and then slide the leg up to it so it just automatically by itself references where it needs to go and then I'm going to come over here and mark the other side and just to confirm that that's in the right place so now I've marked that out and I can put some mechanical pencil led in there to make it easier to see then what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my cutting gauge and I'm going to scribe the baseline for this joint in and the baseline is half an inch in so I set this cutting gauge to half an inch and I just scribe that across on both sides paint that in and then I want to take my knife and square I want to drop the line down so the way I'm going to do that is once again you use your knife line your existing knife line so I drop it in there with the flat facing in I just move the square up to it and then drop the knife flat towards the waist drop it into my knife line move the square over drop the knife to my base line now I can begin to saw the walls of this knotch so what class saw cut is this first second third fourth anybody second well it would probably be a first class saw cut because this is like a ten inch shoulder and that it's going to be very visible so I think we want to you know get every trick we can to make this joint look as tight as it can so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a wide chisel drop it in the knife line with the bevel facing the waist as always give it a little rap and then come and pare away the little V notch that's going to get us started then I'm gonna take a crosscut saw and pick one that's fairly fine you know that's 11 or 12 points crosscut you know you want this cut to be you want this cut to be nice take all the weight off the toe [Music] [Music] [Music] now you have a lot of options is how you can remove this waste you could take a coping saw you could take a bow saw you could take a router plane and take a little way of shaving at a time I am I guess a little bit more of a brute and so I just like to pop it out most of it with a chisel and then finish up with a router plane so I'm going to I'm above I'm Way above the line so I'm gonna leave some waste so I'm here I'm like what about 1/8 3/16 above the line at first just to see how the pines gonna split and then I'm going to take a couple more whacks until I'm close the more the more waste you remove with the chisel the less work the other tools have to do and getting good with a chisel is you know paramount it's a good hand work I think it'd be great to offer a chap a Classon and chiseling but no one would come I mean it's just not sexy to haul it's like accurate all work next week then we're gonna take the router plane and we're gonna clean this up clean the bottom up router planes are great because they're like chisels with depth stops so this router plane when it's set to this 1/2 inch depth and the depth stop is engaged is it's going to make four notches that are all have their bottoms perfectly flat and parallel with one another assuming that your edges are parallel and that is a really powerful very very powerful function and something that the router plane is very good at so router planes are just used with a sort of sweeping motion so I work from the outside to the middle on both sides you can't take off a huge bite but you can take off significant you know you should be able to get it close so I'm getting it almost to my line so that's almost to my knife line and then finally on the last pass I'm going to drop the tip into the knife line that I established and then I'm going to secure the depth stop so that I can return to this depth three more times when I cut the rest of the notches and then just take a nice little cut and I'm working from the outside to the middle to avoid that awful spell chain and now the moment of truth the reason I hate that the cameras on and ten or eleven people watching we get to see how I did well it's not bad it's not bad yeah okay now you do it I will see I'll I will applaud but any questions on that I mean it's just it's really with the router plane yeah it's really really really simple work so go at it we have router planes here that you can borrow a couple of them and this one set perfectly to a half an inch and let's see what we can do [Music] the key to clamping these up is to take those little shims that I told you to save and tape them to the pads of your clamp and you know you want to make sure that the thick part of the taper is at the top and the thin part hey you know it could happen you know somebody could mess that up so you got to say it and so you get your clamps arranged like that and then you get some glue yellow glue is fine then you get a an assistant and so which do is make sure you know what your top is and that's marked so you don't accidentally put it in upside down grab your glue paint each notch better to use a little too much glue than too too too much glue than too little and be sure to get a little bit on the walls even though the walls are in Grain there's still some holding power that you can squeeze out of there so why not you know don't just ignore them okay and then you want to get the mating legs and these two and you want to spread glue on those as well you want to make sure that I mean the there are no dry spots because this has to be a good joint would you mind spreading that lovely assistant later on we'll be sawing Megan in half which is a first-class saw cut you got to work fast cuz you don't have much open time with this yellow glue I need that more than that alright so you have these which go and the other side's to hold those for a second and these go on this side always check here now I'm going to turn this over Megan and then if you could then place those that would be great that's the back one okay you got it again okay that'll get in so hold both and then we're gonna set it squeeze them we're gonna set it up like that now we want to do is push it down onto the birdsmouth shoulder and be looking in there to make sure that we are really up against it yeah no okay we'll use the clamp to spring to hold that hold that one up okay so hold things together you got it okay okay hold it right there this clamp is of course we're gonna have to cut got this pad needs to be moved down these clamp pads are longer than I thought thank you I pipe clamps at home there we go it's an easy fix put the pads right over that and then begin to squeeze okay now hold it hold the legs ready and then [Music] you're done walk away I'm sorry and then come yeah all right not too hard but we do it in groups no we don't want to drive we help our other friends [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] we let the glue dry we let this dry overnight you don't have to let it dry overnight but it doesn't hurt and now we have a choice we can either go ahead and put on the lower stretchers or we can nail the top in and then put on the lower stretchers let's put on the nails just for something different take the clamps off here and you can if you want just use screws use drywall screws but instead what I like to use are cut nails and these are masonry nails these are eight penny masonry nails and if you go to a real hardware store not a home center you'll find these for about a dollar fifty a pound and that's a great bargain compared to what you would spend in a reproduction hardware store and it's a one-third or one-fourth the price of what you pay if you bought these at a Home Center now that's the good news the bad news about masonry nails is that they've been hardened duh to go into masonry and so you can't clench them meaning you can't bend them over if you want to make a clenched door or something these will not clinch I promise you that we've tried it so when you use cut nails you always have to drill a pilot just going to split and the other thing you have to be careful of is the way in which you apply the nail into the work we have with a cut nail they are in their thickness consistent but in their width they wedge and so what you want to do is you want to apply it in your work so that the wedge bears into the end grain and so the the wedge shape should be parallel with the grain of the board otherwise it will just split the ends it should be pretty obvious but a lot of people get a little mixed up the first time they do it and like I said a pilot hole is is critical so we're gonna lay out this where we're gonna put these and you know might as well be tidy so we're gonna measure down an inch and 1/8 from the top of our legs which should put the nails just a little bit below the centerline of the top and we want to leave this scrap up here don't flush up the scrap because this extra meat up here at the top is going to help prevent things from splitting as you drive the nail so it's a little it's a little help helper and then we're going to take our dividers or whatever measuring tool and make a couple marks on our line and that's where we'll put our nails two nails per some people will dovetail the nails meaning they'll put them in at an angle you can do that if you want I would suggest you experiment with it first I don't really dovetail all that much dovetail nails maybe a little bit but in a case like this you already you're dealing with enough angles to make it difficult to drive the nail so why make it any harder this is a 5/32 pilot and I'll either use five thirty seconds or three sixteenths for eight-penny or take it and then as we always say hope this works [Applause] and that's all there is so let's go ahead and do all four legs nail them and you can set them if you want to or you can set them later before you plane down the legs but we'll get through that and then we're going to put on the lower structures and start practicing how to do half lap joints any questions about nails all right [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] the next step is getting this short stretcher in place on the inside of our legs here on this reference edge that we had planed at the very beginning and we have two things we need to accomplish to get this working one is this surface these two legs need to be coplanar to each other so that this will sit flat on it so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to mark on the leg approximately where the short stretcher is going to go and that's twelve and a half inches down from this corner so take your you know long ruler or whatever and Mark make a mark at 12 and a half and if it's a little off from 12 and a half that doesn't matter but that's a good place to put them and so I know now that this area you know around in here that these two surfaces need to be fairly coplanar for this to work I want to I'm going to cut half laps on the end of the stretcher and I don't want to have to be tweaking you know half laps to a weird at complementary angle to match the complementary angle here I'd rather have this be flat and these joints be flat so what in in the end what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this and I'm going to look for gaps and I can see that this edge is high here and I can see that this corner over here is high so I'm going to take a block plane and true-up these two surfaces until my stretcher sits flat so I'm going to do that for both inside services of the leg and the other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to true up the stretcher itself with the with with the plane and because you know this surface meets this surface right here we'll say this surface because it looks better is that we have with this is going to be a reference surface and it's going to be our show surface because it's going to ultimately face out so this is the case where your reference face in your show face are one in the same so we're going to true this completely flat and then the top edge which faces up is going to have to be a reference edge so we want to make sure that this edge is 90 degrees to this face so that's the next stage we need to get to is making this area ready for the stretcher and this stretcher flat and ready for the half laps that'll join it to the inside of the legs so do that for both stretchers all right okay [Music] there are probably lots of ways to get the short stretcher lined up with the legs to market but this is the way that I found works pretty well I have marks little knife marks at 12 and a half inches down from the top that's not a totally critical dimension 12 inches is fine if you want to bring it up a little bit if you're gonna cut the leg shorter but twelve and a half inch just works fine for me so I'm just going to clamp this to the legs in position like so and then take a marking knife and scribe the shoulder line right on to the work measuring bad fire bad knife no no hole fire well if your projects really bad fire good but knife good and remember several light strokes are better than one mighty stroke then unclamp it and now I have you know these angles whatever they are are they ten degrees who cares so now we're going to work off our reference face which is also a show face with our marking gauge set to half an inch we want to make a half inch deep lap and then we're gonna knife in the depth all around then we're going to take our knives and we're gonna drop that shoulder line Oh down to our cheek line so I'm going to drop the knife in slide the square over then drop the knife down until I can feel it drop into the cheek line same over here drop my knife into my shoulder line as a reference slide the square to it and this is also the most accurate way of taking a knife line all the way around the board so knife in square knife down knife in square and down and now it's just a simple matter of doing what we have done before which is to cut this kind of like a tenon cheek and anybody want to guess what class of saw cut I'm going to use here I could use the first but I'm going to start on a corner so I'm probably going to want to use a second class socket to make sure that this is accurate I mean yeah I want it to look nice but I think that rather than knifing in all this I'm just going to take one quick stab at that corner you could do a first class if you like remember waist towards the operator and knife in the corner will hand pressure come in remove the waist get a rip saw this is a rip saw at about ten points per inch drop it into the notch take all the weight off the toe use your thumb to extend this line all the way across the endgrain until we get to about an eighth of an inch deep and then go to town walking down the shoulder of the cheek here flip around bring it down now you have to be careful because this is at an angle and it's real easy to you know saw below your baseline there if you're not careful so it's good to be able to see the angle as you're going down and getting that hump from the middle this is a first-class saw cut pretty visible but it's also we just need that back your seat because we really want the shoulder to be really tight up against the leg so we're gonna make a notch across that drop this is a cross cut sash drop it into that notch [Music] pretty clean and I'm gonna cut all of them and then we're gonna clean them up with a router plane so that they're all the same depth so let's do all four of those joints and then we'll come back and look it a little bit how to clean those up with a router plane any questions I think that really you should never try to cut shy of anything and I think you should always go for the line it's easier to cut to a line right on a line than it is to cut a distance away from a line so just go for it if it's a little deeper then it's not gonna affect anything but I think you should just go for it all right so go for it [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay once we get you know our cheeks cut on the saw what we need to do is put the saw bench upside down on your bench and then drop the piece in upside down like this and you can get a read of how bad off you are pretty quickly and I can see that I've got a little twist probably from the saw cuts because everything I knew everything was square you know this made it this surface made it to the legs and now it's twisting so I really want to take this to the router plane and true up these cheeks even though they look good they're probably a little twisted so I'm going to secure this and take my router plane and it's set for a half inch deep cut and maybe a little stronger than that and I want to make sure that it touches everywhere on my cheek so that these are coplanar it looks like it does so then it's just a matter of coming in make sure that's locked and truing up each cheek I'm using the other stretcher to support the unsupported end of the router plane try to definitely clean up all the junk in the corner of the shoulder so that cheek is clean so now we're gonna make the other cheek parallel to it very handy router planes can't take a real big cut but they can take a fairly sizable cut when you work across the grain so they're mostly used traversing and once you get that cleaned up once they're flat then I can shoulder plane some people will go to the shoulder first but the problem is is if this is twisted you know they're not going to get an accurate shoulder so the shoulder plane is as much a measuring tool I think as it is a cutting tool is that behind the knife here I can see when I lay this flat on the surface and I bring it up to my shoulder then I'm tight here at the back and I have probably about less than 1/16 gap up here which means I have some some junk up here that needs to be removed and so what I'll typically do then is I'll come this way and work towards myself so that I don't have to blow out the bottom and I want to remove that junk until I have no gap and so that's how shoulder planes work as a sort of measuring device and a cutting tool so this is your little 6 inch machine a straightedge so let's take a look at this one got pretty much the same situation we're down at the bottom I have a gap and I'm tight down here so I'm going to and then I'm going to show this to the work and I've got pretty tight shoulders on both and I make sure I've got tight shoulders if we're gonna put this on camera a hinge now I can glue up now you can nail and glue up if you want to at the same time but I always think it's better to let it least sit in the clamps for a while so we're going to put some glue on each cheek drop it on in place and then just use some f-style clamps to hold it in place for a while that slid around on me a little bit that's good so yeah these are kind of like winding sticks you know and that you that's gonna be good enough so we'll let that glue dry and we'll come back in about 30 minutes and nail it and we'll move on to the stretcher that joins to two [Music] the glues dry the clamps are off and so now we're going to nail these stretchers in now you can get all kind of engineer on me and you know try to scribe a centerline down this or you can just eyeball it which is what I'm going to do so I'm going to eyeball the angle like that then I'm going to come in with my dividers and do that take my brace and come in then take a six penny masonry nail and remember we want it to cut or the wedge part to bite into the end grain of the top board and then just drive it home do that two nails in each joint and then we're going to work on the center stretcher so this will just take a minute or two [Music] you [Music] [Music] we're getting close to the end now here and really the last piece we have to get in place is the center stretcher and the center stretcher is critical because the reference surface is actually the edge it's not a face because this is the surface that has to mate with these so what we want to do first is we want to take our stretcher and dress it up so that this edge is true completely flat and that these faces are 90 degrees to it both 90 degrees to it that'll make cutting the lap joint a lot easier now you have the opportunity at this point when you're dealing with the stretcher to add any decorative detail that you might like on this one I put chamfers through chamfers that were just cut with a chamfer plane the other option that we're going to do with this one is we're going to put in a oh jee on the ends of this one and so in the end it'll just have an OG sticking out there and that makes it fancy so to do the og what we're going to do is just take a little pattern and og is just an s-shaped curve and lay the pattern on there and trace around it and then we're going to take coping saw because that is the saw that is handy and I don't have a bow saw which would be my other option with a thin enough blade right now so this will do it but it'll be a little slow [Laughter] [Laughter] and then I can just take a rasp and clean up to the line so let's get this all dressed up and cleaned and ready to go and then we will work on the half lap notches that will join the stretcher to our short stretchers [Music] [Music] [Music] I've got some twist in these boards and I could spend a lot of time trying to flatten these out and do and it'll look like dog meat when I'm dying so I'm not gonna do that instead I'm going to cut notches that will be all crazy angles but we don't care what the angles are because we're just going to be able to draw lines and cut to them so these are going to be some of the strangest angles of the whole class here so what I've done to get things in the right place is I've scribed a center line on the underside of my stretcher and I have Center points lines scribed on the show faces and which are also the reference faces of the short stretchers and so I'm first I'm going to line up my center lines with that those Center lines and that's good now because I'm going to be doing a lot of crazy knifing I'm gonna and I have some twists I don't want to make half of the cuts or half of the marks with it this way and half of them that way so I want to lock this down I want to choose one twisty angle or the other not both because both won't work so I'm going to choose this one because it looks less heinous and clamp it down so that it won't twist now won't move double-check everything here okay it's reasonably good and so what I want to do now is I'm going to take this face and scribe the shape of this on to this so I'm going to come back here with my pencil behind so now I've taken this face and this face will enter this at this angle if I go up the other way and now I'm going to scribe the shape below onto the shape above and then I'm going to repeat the process over here so I'm taking the shape of the lower structure it's angle and putting it here and then taking the shape of this stretcher and putting it here so I'm gonna repeat that on all the joints while this is clamped up and then we're gonna connect those dots and then we will cut the notches in both and it'll go together hey well yeah you're looking at me like I have two heads but it works it works famous last words [Music] okay now that we've got the marks laid out all over we can move on to cutting the notches so have the lines for the walls of the notches so I'm going to take a half inch gauge and connect those lines and then I'm going to use a ruler to connect these lines don't use a square because chances are this is not square this is the opposite of square just similar to being the opposite of horse I don't know what that means okay over here and do the same thing looks good and over here put a little pencil line in those and now I can put those notches and this should all be wrote by now I'm gonna use now this isn't gonna show at all so I'm not gonna really do anything you know only the bugs and insects that crawl through my shop we'll see if there's a little any blowout or tear out here on this on this shoulder so I'm not gonna knife it when you can go all first-class on it if you want because you know some people care what the bugs think about and but what I don't I want to cut this shoulder here first and follow that line and then follow this shoulder which there should be the same but just want to watch it to be sure good then we can pop that out with a chisel and then clean that out with the router plane which is still set for a half-inch depth and so we're going to just clean up the bottom of this notch do the other knotch similarly and then show this not to the knotch that we're going to create on the short stretchers just to make sure that everything is a-okay [Music] [Music] [Music] now we're going to saw the notches into the short stretchers that are going to receive the notches we just cut in the long stretcher so that means we're gonna have to saw directly into our assembled project the best way to do that is to take a baton you know it's a piece of 2x4 and clamp it to your bench and that way when you're sawing into your bench you can the force of the saw will keep the saw bench in place that means you don't have to clamp this ten ways from Sunday when you're working it's just a real simple way organ so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to connect these lines and this is their so this is the longest one this might be the wonky a saw bench I've ever made so we'll see if it goes together so now I'm connecting the lines leftover from my layout earlier now I'm going to take a crosscut saw this is a crosscut sash and I'm going to saw and I want to leave the pencil line I don't want to split the pencil line I want to leave it alone [Music] all right now the best way to chisel out this waste is to do it flat on the workbench and just pop it out like this instead of up in the air get as close as you dare to your knife line and then finish up things with the router plane and most standard router planes will actually fit in here may not be able to get all the way into the corners but to be able to establish most of the floor and then come in with a chisel and use the floor established in the middle by the router plane to finish up the corners [Music] next step is real quick we're just going to put some glue into the notches and then just put a little clamp pressure on it for half an hour you can nail it if you wish put a little decorative nail in there though it's not really going to do much this half-lap is doing most of the work so once that glue sets up that is pretty much all the structural part of the saw bench and then we can take a flush cut saw and flush everything up and then we will true up the legs [Music] [Music] [Music] don't have a foreskin son [Music] now we're gonna get to the part that I it's the most fun for me which is leveling the legs so they sit flat on the floor and it's a it's a compound cut compound angle cut cut at an angle pretty you know freaky freaky cut if you wanted to try to do it on a table saw a pretty easy cut to do with a handsaw the first trick is you really want a level platform to work off of so either find a place that is level in your shop unlike the floor or your table saw or whatever is level or you know you can take a piece of you know here this is a panel and I leveled it on my bench because this floor is really way out and then you want to shim up the bottom of the legs so that this top is level and so what that means is that this will always be level to the floor if you have a flat floor which is of course almost never but hey you know we don't want to not make it level so I can see from this that I'm pretty close so I need to put a couple shims under here to bring my bubble to the middle these older levels are slower than our modern levels but sure look pretty it's actually an inclinometer so you can set it for any any level that you want so now this mean says I need to bring both of these feet up so it's a little process of back-and-forth okay now we know that this is since the saw bench is going to be for me that it needs to be 19 and 3/4 inch high and so what I'm gonna do is get a block of wood so nice looking block of wood ooh look at that I'm gonna set that up here I'll do this to the camera can see it and then I'm going to go to 19 and 3/4 inch high here pinch it and that's the block that I need to mark all my legs [Music] okay this edge is the best I'm gonna use it mark that one and now I just take this Bock and use it to trace lines all the way around fairly awkward but doable now we just have to saw each of these legs to two lengths [Music] then do the other three and with any luck it'll sit flat if you find a flat spot any questions hopefully yours is goes a little faster than mine [Music] that's the bottom [Music] you

Channel: Popular Woodworking

Views: 119,226

Rating: 4.8619871 out of 5

Keywords: Popular, Woodworking, hand tools, sawbench, christopher schwarz, workbench

Id: M0boAb3EkOY

Length: 103min 49sec (6229 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 24 2020