As I said in the last post, this “Day” is really a group of days working on one of tasks to get the bench completed. This is all about the square bench dogs.
As I have pointed out in several previous posts, I am following the excellent BenchCrafted Split Roubo plan. The square bench dogs are part of that plan.
Following the plan really made the bench dog creation a simple process of stock selection and precise milling.
I had a piece of Jatoba suitable for the material needed. A few passes across the jointer and planer and I had the 15/16″ stock specified. I ripped this stock into the 1 1/4″ pieces required. The rest of the details for the creation of the dogs is best described in the picture and comments for each.
The next interesting task was gluing leather to the twin vise face plate and the contact surface for each dog. Based on my reading I decide to use “brown glue”. The main reason is the ability remove the leather easily at some future date if needed. Specifically since I have never worked with brown glue, I opted to use Titebond Liquid Hide Glue. This was an adventure.
The first thing I did was to glue the leather to the twin vise face plate. This is about 7″ x 30″ surface. So I cut out the leather and found a piece of wood I could use as the clamping caul. My first surprise was the glue did not squirt out of the bottle. I opened the bottle and tried to stir the glue. After stirring for some time I pulled out the stir stick and had a lot of glue. So I just used this to spread glue over the large surface. And I spread more glue and more glue. You get the picture. I applied the leather and started clamping. LOTS of squeeze out. What a mess. I tried to wipe this off with a wet paper towel. Sorta worked but I knew I had a mess on my hands. Decided to deal with it after the glue dried.
So the second part of the twin vise leather gluing did not turn out well. I had glue all over the completely finished surfaces of the face plate. I ended up sanding all of the and cleaning up the mess. This piece has to have at least one more good coat of finish.
The gluing leather on each of the dog pieces went much better. I cut the leather pads a about 1/8″ large and proceeded to apply to each dog. I used a wood caul and an F clamp on each. I did reduce the amount of glue as I proceeded to get to minimum squeeze out.
After expected cleanup the leather on the dogs worked really well. I am very happy with this.
Day 31 will feature the marriage of the top and bottom. begin the final details of the bench build. The will concentrate on the bench dogs required for the tail vise.
Bench Build Blog IndexPlease enjoy the full set of day 29 pictures with detailed comments:
