Maruta Bench – Build 2

The last post left off with turning the short seat stretchers round on the lathe. I had pre-cut a 60mm Ø shoulder prior to turning, which will be trimmed to fit the joining long seat stretchers.

Here’s another shot of the turned stretchers and the curved shoulder cuts. I was really glad that turning went well on these pieces, with virtually no tearout around the thin edges.

Before scribing these pieces to fit, I shifted gears to cut the leg joinery. The legs involve the same sort of tenon with curved shoulders, but instead of joining the seat stretchers at 90°, the legs are splayed out by 16°. Here is the layout on the legs. At this point you can also see how I started to cut out the tenon on each leg. I used the table saw to make those cuts.

When I first did the layout on the legs I used a compass to draw the curve where the legs meet the 60mm Ø long seat stretchers (which you can see in the picture above). Since the legs are splayed out and joining the round seat stretchers at an angle, the shape of the joint becomes more oval shape, meaning my layout using the compass to draw a perfect circular curve was a bit inaccurate. At first I thought I would just go with the layout lines drawn by the compass, and just rough cut leaving plenty of room to trim the fit later on. But then I realized I could just cut off the end of one of the long stretchers (which were extra long at this point) at the same angle as the legs (16°) and use that cut off to layout the exact shape that I needed. So that’s what I did, and I think it was the right way to go. Using this little cut-off as a template gave me much more concrete layout lines, with no guesswork, meaning I could cut closer to those lines prior to turning, saving time during scribing.

Here are the finished layout lines for the curved shoulders.

To rough cut the angled shoulders, first I used a chop saw to cut as close as possible to the layout lines.

From there I used round chisels to trim the shoulders closer to the layout lines. Then it was just a matter of trimming and fine tuning each tenon to get them to fit with their respective mortises. Here’s how things looked once the joint started to come together.

One more step before putting these pieces on the lathe was to cut the mortises for the leg stretchers. The legs are 45mm Ø and the leg stretchers are 30mm Ø. I mentioned in the first post how I decided to try something different for these joints. Instead of scribing and fitting the leg stretchers to the legs, like I’ve doing up until this point, here I decided to inset the leg stretchers into the legs. The finished fit will look similar to a scribed joint, but the overall approach is completely different. Both methods have their share of pros and cons. Insetting the parts is in a lot of ways simpler and more straightforward, but it requires extra care when finish planing the round stretcher to size. Too much planing and there will be a gap, and there’s not going back from there.

Below you can see the process involved. First I cut the mortises and then I drilled out a hole centered on each mortise where the stretchers will be inset. I ran into a new problem when it came to drilling. Despite the fact that the bit was relatively sharp and could start cutting a clean hole, by the time I reached the bottom of the cut, the very edge of the hole would start to burn. The bit was definitely rubbing and causing enough friction to burn the edge.

I was using a Star-M auger bit for the drilling. I think the bit may have been dropped and the cutting spur may have bent inwards a touch, such that it starts cutting a hole slightly narrower than the main body of the bit. In any case the damage was done and unfortunately I needed to increase the hole diameter to remove the burned wood, which also meant remaking the leg stretchers which I had already milled to size. From there I cut the remaining holes and enlarged the burned ones using a router and template, which worked out well and no burining, woo hoo!

With the holes finally cut, I put each leg on the lathe to shave them round.

I could have plugged the holes and fit scrap material around the tenons to prevent tear out while turning but honestly that seemed like too much work. Instead I just used a sharp gouge, worked carefully and things came out really cleanly. I know there are certain “best practices” in woodworking, and frankly sometimes I show methods here on my blog that completely disregard those practices. My views on woodworking have changed a lot over time, but more and more I think it’s less important to stick to hard-line rules. More than rules I think it’s important to be able to adapt to the situation, and learn where you can cut some corners and where you need to slow down and take things slow. Every situation and every piece of wood is different.

Back to the legs on the lathe. Like the seat stretchers these came out really clean as well, with no tearout around the mortises or tenons.

One final step before scribing was to plane the legs and short stretchers that had just come off the lathe. I planed them the same way I did the long stretchers in the first post, using a flat plane leaving a subtle texture and lightly faceted surface.

So, on to the main event, scribing the legs and seat stretchers. Here is one of the legs during scribing. Precutting before turning definitely got me to the 95% point, with relatively minor gaps around the joint. To fine tune the fit I used a pencil to mark the areas that were touching.

Here’s another leg after marking with pencil.

I used a couple soto-maru-nomi (outside round chisels) to trim to the pencil line.

Here is the fit after trimming.

Here’s the same leg from another angle. Overall the seam is pretty good, and any minor gaps will close up when putting the draw-bored pegs in.

I used the same process to scribe and trim the short seat stretchers as well.

Fitting the leg stretchers to the legs involved a slightly different process.

Since the leg stretchers are inset into the legs, I was really careful not remove too much material when planing the leg stretchers. Instead I made the leg stretchers a bit oversized, by 1 mm or so, and from there I could use a combination of trimming with the plane, as well as a bit of ki-goroshi to fit the leg stretchers into the round mortises in the legs. (Ki-goroshi is the process of compressing wood with light taps from a hammer.)

After trimming and fitting the joints, this is how things came together.

That about does it for the main joinery on this bench. Next week I’ll cover the last few details, including cutting the pegs holes in the tenons, putting the whole bench together, and weaving the Danish cord seat. Thanks for following along.