To Eat an Elephant, You Take One Bite at a Time.

I decided to take an early day from work and came home to work on the bench. I had sharpened the plane blades the night before, so I was looking forward to the work.

As you can see, there was way to much dried glue from the squeeze out when I glued them together.


One of the first things I had to do was remove the excess length of dowel so the boards would lay flat. I chose to do that with a sharp chisel... in the future I'll use a saw. The chisel did the job, but caused the dowel to break lower than the surrounding board. Since this is just a work bench and looks aren't as important I'm not going to worry about it. If this had been a piece of furniture though, I'd have been seriously put out.

There's many ways to remove dried glue. I used the chisel to get the majority of it off before using my jointer plane to roughly square the boards. One thing I've learned is that excess glue dulls the plane blades much faster than otherwise necessary. I'll have to decide on a way to remove the excess glue before it gets hard.

One of the legs after removing the glue from one side.

Using a straightedge to check how flat the side is. As you can see, the side is pretty flat.

I use a mortiseing scribe to get the boards as close to dimensionally the same as I'm able. I'm not perfect, but I'm getting the boards to within at least 1/32 of an inch of the same size, and for now I think that is fine.

If you look closely on the upper edge of the board, you will see the one of the scribe lines.

Both legs I finished today. I like the contrasting walnut dowel. I have a feeling I'll use something like this when I do the furniture.

More pics of the two legs.

A pic with one leg on its side. You can see the laminated boards.

The shavings from both legs, made quite a pile.

Not the thinnest shavings I've made, but adequate. I've decided I much prefer planing Beech to the Red Oak I'd been planing.