I've already blogged Az Chevalet so this will be a simple "keep you up to date" one about "Chevy II". When I moved to my current address and built my shop I was fortunate enough to run into a fellow who was moving and had to sell his hoard of local hardwoods. Long story short, I bought two heaped pickup truck fulls of a variety of local hardwoods, all two or more years air dried, for $200 and he helped me move it.

I'm not usually a big Oak fan but as there was a fair amount of quite large dimension Garry Oak in the mix and because Oak would be a good fit for the chevalet (and because I was getting tired of moving it) I decided to give it a try.

This is the kind of stuff that was in the pile.

 

By the time I milled this down, I had a day's worth of firewood, a garbage bag full of planer shavings, and the base cross-member.

 

The next piece was worse. The wood is not too bad but the person who milled it was a butcher to be polite. Clearly he wasn't using an Alaska Mill or the like. This piece was three inches thick. I got 1 1/2" and shavings.

 

 

Enough complaining. The other species in the buy were all in much better shape and I've used them in almost all my projects in the last six years. The good news here is that I've used up almost all the Oak and I was able to get enough to finish the frame parts where I wanted to use it.

Here are a few more pictures up to where I am now.

 

 

These are a couple of quick jigs I had to make up today. The first is to mortise for the angled back leg into the seat. I guess I should have gone the extra bucks and bought the mortiser that did angles. Who knew?

 

This one was sort of a fun time. Somewhere (in the glue up I suspect) the vertical post developed a twist. I didn't notice it until the cheek pieces for the arm clamp were glued on. When I first assembled the arm into the clamp it became obvious that the arm was not parallel to the base piece. This will not lead to anything good. The answer was to lay the post down and, with winding sticks and power plane, straighten the front face of the post and clamp cheeks. That's all nice and everything but the clamping face is still as crooked as it ever was and now has to be trued up to the new front face. I made this simple jig to ground out the clamp face to an even depth from the new front surface. It's just a scrap of 1/4" plywood with a couple of spring clamps to keep the saw and the plywood together. The saw, moving sideways back and forth across the surface eventually did the job just fine.

 

Here's the progress to date. The bench is all ready to glue up first thing tomorrow and the "structural" part will be complete.

 

If anyone knows where I can get a "CHEVY II" grill emblem, please let me know.

Bye for now.

Paul