Green wood glue up

[Juan Hovey]

I'm making a workbench for my son in law out of black locust cut from a single tree, and I've got some questions about gluing up the top - three boards 2 /14 inches thick.

The wood is green; my moisture meter, which is reliable within broad limits, reads 20 percent - very wet. I wouldn't try working any other wood that wet, but black locust is pretty stable, and I'm thinking that once I get the base and top all cinched up, everything will dry more or less at the same rate, and maybe the worst that can happen is that I get some end-grain splitting on the top.

I'm thinking I might limit that risk if I paint the end grain and cover it with end caps. What think you?

Also, Titebond III seems the best bet for the glue-up, but would I do well to use splines cut from the same locust?

[Jim Koepke]

Maybe you could take a trick from those who turn green wood; soak the wood in denatured alcohol, wrap the cut pieces up in plastic for a few days then finally wrap it loosely in wrapping paper to slow dry over the next week or so. Wet wood turning uses plastic bags for the soak and paper bags for the drying.

Not sure how it works, but it keeps some of my lathe work from splitting.

jtk

[Mike Holbrook]

They made up a simple place to dry green wood during our Continuous Arm Windsor Chair class. We needed to dry the long pieces used for the continuous arm for our chairs, as they did not fit in the kiln/drying box. They put all the pieces in a small closet/storage area with a bright light and put moving tarps over the entrance to further hold the heat. They got mostly dry after just a day or two. Many kilns used for drying green wood are very simple insulated areas with just a light or two.

[george wilson]

I'm not sure what thickness 2/14" is. Does that mean 2 1/4",or is it really 2/14" thick? If 2 1/4",it will take over 2 years to dry,and it will not be really stable even by then. I dried beechwood for 10 years to make a cooper's jointer,and it STILL warped very badly. But,that was beech. In my experience,though,the harder a wood is,the worse it is to be filled with high stresses.

I'm not sure that the black locust won't pretty much self destruct eventually,warping badly,splitting,and coming unglued.

[Juan Hovey]

Well, as my sweet wife likes to tell me, every ink-stained wretch needs an editor. The top is 2 1/4 inches thick - three boards, each about eight inches wide, all quarter sawn. Having spent recent days manhandling the darn things, I weighed one this morning: 70 pounds. Yikes.

[Winton Applegate]

Oh, Oh, Oh !
!
Here I am sitting on my hands, passively following this madness . . .
half not understanding the problem at hand . . .
when . . .
I think I actually have the answer from a work bench(s) I made a long time ago and still have.
Referring to the photos bellow :
Rather than plane all these boards, 15 ft 2x4s from the lumber yard and glue them, I didn't have that many clamps then, I went all crazy cat and just drilled and bolted them together. Being the metal head that I am I cross drilled, then precision counter bored the outside faces for washers and nuts and machined the ends of the bolts really nicely so the ends of the all thread was flush with the nuts. The washers, not being round, hole centered, you name it . . . I ganged on a mandrel and turned the outsides of all of them the same size on the metal lathe so that they were a piston slip fit into the counter bores in the 2x4 faces and so the holes were coaxial with the outside diameters. You know kind of an ART project juxtaposing the chaos of the rough 2x4 with the turned and machined "bolts".

Just having "fun".

Then I planed the planing beams flat. I eventually cut the one beam into two shorter beams. I also made the short beam shown. I wasn't sure how long of a long beam I wanted back then so I made one that was plenty long. This was in lew of finding a nice solid beam to make my planing beam out of which was quite impossible where I live.
Anyway . . .

PS: maybe I should have went out "wood wright shop" style and cut down a telephone pole. The city has so many of them they surely wouldn't miss just one.
Right ?
He, he, he, Roy Underhill actually lived here in the same town and actually got in trouble with the city for felling some trees on Cheyenne Mountain. I am not kidding.

PPS: I am not saying make him a planing beam I am saying through bolt your joints. You don't even have to glue them up. I never did and the beams work great.

[george wilson]

Just messing with you,Juan!! But,I really have serious doubts about the locust staying flat.

I used a piece of 5" thick beech about 24" wide that I bought at a country sawmill while working on the big cider screw. It was kept in my heated shop at work for over 5 or 6 years,and was reasonably dry when I bought it. Sure enough,they quit sawing it up because it had a piece of barbed wire through it(WHAT do they make that stuff out of?? Tool steel?) Anyway,though I waited the required 1" per year of thickness and then some,the plank still wanted to bow concave after it got planed down to 4" thick. I bolted it to some heavy beechwood beams underneath,and kept it under control.

[Juan Hovey]

George - Right. My sweet wife messes with me, too, every time she finds me abusing the language. The joke here is that we were journalists for most of our careers, I as a reporter, city editor, assistant city editor and biz-page columnist respectively at the KC Star, Santa Fe New Mexican (my home town), Oakland Tribune and LATimes, she as a copy and features editor for the St. Louis Globe Democrat, Oakland Tribune, LA Daily News, and LATimes.

I got the glory as a big-paper columnist, but she was the one who shared in a Pulitzer as part of a team covering a huge cops-and-robbers shootout one year in LA. She's the best editor I've ever known and the only one I ever trusted with my own work, despite the fact that she lords it over me whenever she gets a chance to blue-pencil something I've written.

Oh, well. After 36 years of this, am I going to complain?

We'll see about the locust. I'm going to paint the end grain on the top and cover it with end caps attached with bed bolts. I may also drive galvanized lag bolts into the middle board on the top and cover the holes with locus dowels. Last but not least, I'll mortise the legs all the way through the top and secure them with wedges. And if the thing breaks apart, what the heck, I'll make my son in law another bench.

I owe you a reply to an earlier posting and will get to it once I finish this project and get back to making infill planes. I want to take four to WIA and have only two more or less finished.