The sawhorse that almost wasn’t.

I’ve been gone a little longer than I had anticipated.  A few weeks ago we went on vacation so the week prior to that all my free time was devoted to getting ready to take 5 people and a dog north for 7 days.

First things first.  I finished the sawhorse before we left.  It’s…well, interesting.  With not having previously made anything with angled legs, I approached this as a good first attempt. Honestly, it was bad.

Creating the 10 degrees off center cuts for the legs to angle out was more difficult that it should have been.  The first and second legs were bad, the third was decent, and the fourth was back to ugly.  I just couldn’t get it right.  My awesome skills aided me again when I started to glue the legs to the top.  This was a fanciful event where I created new bad words and nearly set the whole thing on fire.  Schwarz suggested to tape on the leg off-cuts to the legs so as to create a vertical surface for the clamps.  Mine didn’t really work out that way.  I ended up with some glue and grabbing some screws.

Then, I went to attach the long stretchers and the legs on each side were out of plane with each other.  So I skipped the side stretchers.

And did I mention I somehow attached the short stretchers at different heights?

Sawing the half-laps for the short stretchers was fun and not terribly difficult.  Actually, I got them darn near perfect with only minimal clean-up with my router plane.

Other than flush cutting the tops of the legs, it’s done.

Leveling the feet was also stress-free compared to the rest of the steps.

While I wasn’t happy with how it turned out, this was basically a giant experiment.  The wood for the saw bench is ready to be thickness planed and I hope to tackle it this weekend.  Once that is complete I can build my Moxon vise and be that much closer to starting my Dutch tool chest.  However, there’s going to be a slight detour before I can start the chest.  More on that as it develops.

Until next time, have a good one.

Eat a peach,

Jonathan