Monday, May 28, 2012

Building a Bench - The Braces and Top

Leg 2 went just like leg 1. After they were both glued up, I two legs like this one:


Once I had these ready, I had to put some cross braces on them to support the top. My initial design had me cutting two 14" pieces and screwing them to the legs. I clamped them on, leveled them, and then screwed them into the side of the leg.


Once I had that done, I got the top ready by just laying the boards on top to see how they looked. Each top piece is a 46" 2x4 that was just cut to length and put on.


It looked pretty good, so it was time to then get more serious.


I grabbed my Kreg pocket hole device and started to put holes in the cross braces (after removing them from the legs). This would allow me to attach the top from below, without any holes in the top. I put two holes in for each top piece (4), which was a total of 8 holes in each brace, or 32 with 4 braces.


I screwed everything together, just to check the height, and it was too high. I'd set the  length of the legs at 22", but when I sat down, that was a little tall. I had my daughter check and her feet were swinging free, so I knew I'd need to cut things down.

I also realized that the cross braces would show below the edging I had planned, so I also needed to remove the cross braces and cut an angle off the bottom of them. However I left that for another day.