You may recall the "lumber gloat" that I had not long ago when my cabinetmaker neighbor was cleaning out his shop and gifted me a bunch of material that he didn't feel he would be able to use. You know, "trash" like purple heart, mahogany, bocote and rosewood. Well, there happened to be a nice black walnut crotch slab there, too. I was curious about this dusty, dirty crotch slab actually looked like, so while I was in-between shellac applications on the tiger maple Shaker style candle stand project, I decided to run it through the drum sander a bit and see what was revealed...

bench-1.jpg

Ok...that's nice! Hmm. 'Need a bench for the kitchen for putting on shoes and boots. Hmm. Natural edge...nice! Ok, let's do it! So I kept the drum sander going for a very long time with 36 grit, making this slab "relatively" flat and workable. Switched to 80 grit for a bit to take out some of the scratching and then broke out the Rotex to complete that task. (Sorry...no pictures of all that work. I forgot in my excitement of actually working on projects IN my shop for a change)

I have a few more black walnut slabs in "inventory" from a large tree that came down on the property back in 2000, so I picked out one of those that really wasn't usable for a seat or table top and cut it down with the Festool saw on a rail to make a couple of hefty legs, paying attention to getting some nice crotch figure for them, too. One is 13 1/2" wide and the other is 10" wide. I decided to make the bench, itself, 36" wide, so I chose the start and end-points and again used the Festool saw on a guide rail to make the cuts, keeping the two ends parallel. Some additional shaping was done with the sanders.

bench-2.jpg

Since this piece would be used for seating and live on a brick floor, I wanted a stretcher between the legs for additional stiffness--a through tenon would look great, so that is what I chose to do. I did some layout on the bottom of the bench portion using the legs to determine the exact placement of this cross member to be installed 7" down from the slab. The mortises were opened up at the DP with a nice 1 1/4" Forstner bit and then completed by hand at the bench, using these great hold-downs I got from Joel at Toolsforworkingwood.com. (They really are great!) It took awhile to whack things and pare things smooth and square, but it was a good job to be doing while the USL coats were drying on the candle stand and the natural edge table I had to repair.

bench-3.jpg

bench-4.jpg

In the mean time, I also roughed the tenons on the stretcher at the TS and BS and then brought it to the bench for final fitting of each end. Please note that I purposely roughed them larger since through-tenons really need to fit properly on the visible end. Paring them down at the bench with a variety of tools, including chisels, planes and, umm...sandpaper...was just the ticket. I only need to do a very little "sliver filling" once things were finally assembled. Here's the first one after fitting:

bench-5.jpg