Finished product first. Pretty pleased with how it’s turned out. I finished it with three coats of Danish Oil and one coat of beeswax for the shine.
I made a quick SketchUp model to get an idea of the proportions and style. I wanted mitred joints with angled edges.
Bought some ~3m long sweet chestnut boards from a local boat builder. The tree was felled nearby (about 20 miles away). He ran the boards through his planer/thicknesser for me for free, which was a pretty huge bonus for me as I only have a 15cm planer/thicknesser in my workshop.
Here you can see my tiny workshop. It’s a 1.8 x 2.4 m stone walled outbuilding which until a couple of years ago was in a pretty bad state of affairs. I made a separate album for the bench build and the roof repair.
Dry fit of the mitres. It turns out that leaving the boards in my slightly damp shed made them cup a bit. As such, the cuts I made with my circular saw followed that cup, meaning the mitres didn’t line up properly. I had to do some planing to get them to sit flush.
I added some dowels in the mitres to make aligning the joints easier. This was partially successful in the actual glue up.
Testing the dowels for alignment. This was after I’d manually adjusted the mitre joints to be more flush.
I decided to add a bowtie to strengthen this leg as it had a split in it. The bowtie is a piece of oak firewood which happened to have a nice grain pattern by virtue of being next to a group of small knots.
Bowtie in place and looking pretty. It only required a little sawdust and glue to make it seamless. Fortunately, I had quite a lot from sanding!
Preparing the shelf for the cut. I had planned on adding another bowtie in here, but decided against it in the end.
Since the board had cupped in storage and that had caused me some issues with the mitred joints, I decided to cut the shelf along its length so I could run each piece through my planer/thicknesser. Each of the boards was just narrow enough to fit though. I went with dowels as before to help with the alignment during glue up.
What is it people say? You never have enough clamps. I can vouch for that!
I added dados to the legs for the shelf. I didn’t want to have to make an oddly shaped dado to accommodate the live edge, so I opted for square dados. This meant I had to cut a little notch out of the ends of the shelf, which was easy enough, though a little nerve wracking.
Dry fit to check the shelf fitted well. Everything was reasonably square and tight.
Actual glue up. This was not a fun experience. The end result is poorer than I had hoped for as the mitres didn’t sit as flush as I’d have like them to.
Post-glue up. I had to sand the top and sides a little to get the mitres to look good.
First coast of Danish Oil thinned by about 5% (I just eyeballed it). The oil really makes the live edge come, well, alive.
Back where we started, in the garden. The wax was freshly applied and buffed with a cotton cloth.
