this is our porch it needs a bench the idea for this bench came from this bench this bench camefrom this piece of wood this piece of wood came from a dumpster i don't know where this dumpster came from
router woodworking home depot, so i originally built this bench when iwas out for a walk one day and found a piece of wood in a dumpster i just kind of wanted to see what icould do with it so i brought it home and i made this bench
the benches kind of flimsy as you cansee it's the wood was probably only about a half of an inch thick maybe a little bit more than that tostart by the time i got it all nice and smooth it was pretty thin i wouldn't recommend sitting on thisbench i brought it to my office and i pretty much just use it to set a couplebags on partly because it's convenient and partly because it deters people fromsitting on it i did have one guy sit on at one timekind of a bigger guy actually probably 210 pounds didn't break but there's alot of creaking going on
so i actually really like the design ofthis bench you know it's very simple pretty minimal i really love the look of angled andtapered legs so i ran with that idea i went through a couple of design ideasbefore finally landing on this design you can see it has all of the exact samepieces that the original bench has but each piece is just slightly different i don't know that i normally would havepicked cherry to build something outside but i had some leftover cherry fromanother build so i took the path of least resistance plus the bench is goingto sit under porch
it's not really going to be out in thesun or in the rain or anything like that and the weather here in southerncalifornia is pretty mild so i'm sure it'll be fine after i joined and planned all thecherry to the proper thickness i built the four legs i can get all fourlegs from two small chunks of wood by kind of flipping things around andnesting them together the legs are going to angle in 15degrees from 90 degrees so i guess that's 75 degrees from being vertical istarted by making a 15 degree cut from the top and bottom of the piece that thelegs and come from
then i marked out one of the legscarefully and cut it out on the band saw i use this first leg as a template forthe rest using it to mark and cut out the others also at the bandsaw once i had all of the pieces cut out i clamped them together with the outside edges flushand i run their wobbly edge over the jointer again so that they're all perfectly equal. one of the repeating themes that i findwith woodworking and i'll probably say this over and over accuracy is way less important thanrepeatability what i mean is if
something is supposed to be 16 inches it isn't really that important that itends up being exactly 16 inches it can be a 32nd of an inch off either way and atsome level you can't really control for that but what's more important is beingconsistently short or long by that 32nd of an inch as long as you repeat the same cut overand over things are usually going to come out okay back to the legs now that the shape iscreated it's time to start cutting in some joinery i went ahead and cut somededos for all the connector pieces that
will run between the front and back ofthe legs on either side we know that the outside edge angles are15 degrees so i basically set up the dado blade spent a bunch of time accurately marking out where all of my cuts needed to beset my miter gauge at 15 degrees and started nibbling away cutting the cross connector pieces wasthe first part of the bench that was a little tricky the reason for this is because of thetaper the legs i knew that the outside edge of thecrosspieces would be at 15 degrees to
match up with the legs but the inside ofthe legs are basically just some random unknown angle i did my best to measure and i came upwith 18 degrees also each crosspieces a different widthbasically they need to get wider as you get closer to the top of the leg where the leg gets wider. so again marked out everything set the blade andcut a 15-degree angle off one side and an 18-degree angle off the other side for the bottom crosspieces i also cut adado on the top which will eventually
hold a stretcher that will keep the legsfrom wanting to move away from each other when somebody sits on top of thebench now is ready to glue up the legs and dosome sanding the legs aren't quite complete herebecause i need to wait till the very end to glue on the top piece after the seatis on otherwise there'd be no way to get the seat in with the base mostly finished i turn my attention to the stretcher. thepiece that would run between the too legs this was the second tricky part of thebuild. i needed to cut joinery on the
ends to mate with the dados i just cutin the crosspieces but the inside edge needed to match that 18 degree angle i couldn't use the data blade herebecause if you tilt the blade at 18 degrees you're going to end up with itway higher on one side of the other so instead i made a cut with a regularblade at 18 degrees then i turn the piece vertical and cut out the remainder this left to minimize version of theproblem the dado blade with a left but it was easy to clean up with the chisel i went ahead and left the piece long onthe edges so that i could clean it up to
match the outside 15-degree angle aftergluing the whole base together here i am trimming off those extrapieces for the top i had to use two boardsglued together it's about 15 inches wide which isalmost twice the width of my joiner when i'm gluing that pieces like this ilike to use a few dominoes to help with alignment i don't know that they really provideany extra strength but they make it easier to keep the board's alignedvertically and horizontally after a little cleanup i cut the top tothe finish length and width
since the ends were uneven and theboard was too wide to use my miter gauge i used a tracks to cut it square intothe finished length i wanted to put a really long bevel onthe underside of the ends but a blade on a table saw only tilts to 45 degrees atleast on my table saw so instead of having that be my limit iset the blade at 15 degrees and cut the piece vertically so that would be theequivalent of being able to tilt your blade to 75 degrees to attach the top tothe base i use these figure 8 clips i don't know if that's their technicalname they're pretty easy to install and they allow for wood movement so i reallylike them
i probably should have done this beforei had assembled the legs but it came out fine plus placement isn't really thatimportant since they're going to be hidden on the underside i'm pretty happy with the way the benchcame out it's definitely different and modern-lookingbut i think it also has a sort of japanese-ish quality to it i don't really know what japanese-ishmeans but i don't know that's just the way it comes off to me if i were tobuild it again i think i'd do a couple of thingsdifferently i'd probably make the taper a
little more exaggerated keep it the sameat the bottom but maybe make it a little wider at the top i'd also played with the idea of havingtwo cross stretchers one in the front and one in the back instead of just havingone in the middle like it is know that would probably also help with the stability alittle bit. it's fine but can never be too sturdy i guess thanks for watching if you liked thisvideo good news i'm going to be making more when i would ask of you is pleaseplease please subscribe seriously it would mean the world to mealso follow me on instagram twitter
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