I have finally tackled a job that has neede doing for 20 years, and introduced a ‘new ‘ tool into the mix.

I made my bench in 1986 while sitting on a concrete floor under the house in Townsville (bit south of Cairns in Queensland but a lot drier) using a mallet, brace and 1 bit, two chisels a panel saw and a #4 stanley.

The legs are redgum fence posts, the rails kiln dred mountain ash (another eucalypt) and the top several planks of 50mm oregon. Why? – thats what my fathers bench looked like and it was over thirty at the time, its now nearly 50 and used constantly.

anyway, you will note from the paucity of tools at that time that I probably didn’t get the top very flat. And over the years all i have really done is clean up the area around the vice. Im sort of between tasks at the moment (except for an overdue billy cart) and wanted to try out Adam C’s method of flattening boards on a big surface. The top of this bench is 2.4 * 1.1m. You can spread out three projects at once and not finish any of them without really trying.

One of my brothers has been giving planes left over from auction lots to my kids, the daughter scored a Falcon-Pope #5 that had been set up with a heavy camber on the iron and a wide mouth. So I cleaned it up a little, spent 10 minutes on the grinder and an oil stone and went for it. An hour and a half later the variance across the top is less than 1.5mm and I’m sold on scrub planes. (dont want to do this on an Australian hardwood though)

Well back to practice – off to the Merimbula Jazz festival on the weekend and the director would probably rather I practiced than listened to Dave Brubeck tapes.

Dave