The Mafellator Roubo

Welcome to my new blog. I have a blog, I must be an expert! I was going to start this blog by posting a bunch of philisophical hooey about my approach to woodworking, but after thinking about it, my guess is two months from now my first post wouldn't be up yet. So, instead I'll show you the state of my workbench after having done most of the heavy lifting (literally) at Christopher Schwarz' bench class at Dictum a couple weeks ago.

Just to show you my skill and prowess laying out the order of how the legs should be organized, I used a carpenter's triangle as per CS' instruction. Then I changed my mind. Then, I messed it up anyway.

Anyway, long story short, I got the bench glued up on the last day of the course, and Christopher Schwarz needed a ride to his hotel in Munich. So, I took him with me. Before I dropped him off, he helped unload the bench, which would have probably killed me. I guess he's unloaded 350 pound benches from SUV's before. If you want to see an amusing video of my shop that he shot, check out his Lost Art Press Blog. Anyway, I finally got my keller cleaned out, getting rid of a whole bunch of stuff I don't need down there. My wood-rack for instance is now in another town, but this space is just too small.

After getting that behemouth in my cave, I felt pretty proud of myself, so I thought I would mess around a little with my scrub plane. There was one beam in the glue up that had a pretty dramatic bow in it, which caused it to sit proud of the rest of the bench top a good 3 mm or so. This scrub made mincemeat of it in about ten minutes.

So, there is where we stand now. I was going to next try to get the face vice done, but after reading Wolfram's blog I have decided to install the tail-vice first. I'll be able to use it for doing some of the rest, and there is no point doing any more flattening until the vices and chops are in place.