Yet another Roubo...


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While there are certainly many threads of everyone building their Roubo benches, I figured I would make a quick one to bring things up to speed on my build. I should have started this thread early into the build as then maybe I would have taken more photos. But here it is:

 

Nothing like a truck full of lumber. This build is all hard maple and touches of cherry.

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I totally underestimated how long it would take to mill so much hard maple to laminate the tops, did not take pictures during the process as I was constantly emptying the bin on my dust collector. Two days of milling and two different glue ups resulted in two slabs. Ended up losing about a quarter inch in thickness due to an unnoticed issue with my Hammer A3-31 fence, which caused my initial planing of the front slap to get out of square (Wrote a thread about it a few months ago). 

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Getting the dog hole strip completed and attached was fairly uneventful as was the first iteration of my cherry end cap. This project marked many firsts and the most trying of which was hand cutting the dovetails into the front laminate piece and the end cap. 

 

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While trying to relieve a tight space I nicked myself with a sharp chisel...

 

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Rather than call it a day and let myself relax and forget about how stupid I was with the chisel, I set things into a cascade of bad decisions. I was rushing to get things done as I had to go to work and had a bunch of court that was quickly approaching so I rushed...and in the process I ended up blowing apart my first cherry end cap while trying to force a joint which was too tight. That was mistake #2. So I quickly milled another end cap out of cherry, but had to call it a wrap for the time being. I did not get back to the build until the next week, which marks mistake #3. I was a little disappointed when I discovered that the piece had developed a bow in it that I had to now remove. Had to get a little creative in its placement so I could minimize any issues with it later on. I would have remade it if it were not for the fact that I made the piece out of curly maple. 

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After that fiasco I finally got moving onto the base, which was not too much of a problem at all, pretty straight forward. Legs and base came out well. 

 

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Chiseling into the end grain of the assembled base was a little unnerving as I really did not want to destroy that leg as I made the dog hole relief cut. Just took it nice and slow. Ledger strips for the shelf took a little trial and error for making a nice fit as well. 

 

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Flattening was a long process as well, even with a new bit I still had some tear out on the back laminate. If it were not for my choice to salvage the front laminate piece of curly maple I botched I would have had very little loss of material during the flattening process. I lost just shy of 1/8" on the front laminate in order to get it down to the level of the curly maple where I had the low spots. Because I left the back slab slightly over size I ended up taking off closer to 1/4" of material off the back slab. This proved to be a bad call on my end as I failed to notice that since I was taking everything at a fairly quick single pass that I was getting some good amount of tear out on the back slab.

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I sanded it to 220 and put two coats of Tried and True Oil Varnish as recommended by Mark in the build. I am still putting finish on the back side of the sliding deadman. But here are a couple pictures which bring things up to my current spot in the build as I near the finish line. 

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I am going to make the gap stop this week and then I need to decide on what I am going to do about the dogs themselves. I have not made them as I really wanted to wait for SawStop to come out with the damn lift for my PCS. I don't have a lot of space and would really like to make those on a router table. Anyone have any ideas on how difficult it would be to make all of the dogs by hand on the bandsaw? Should I just wait as I know it is supposed to come out this spring. The wait is killing me. 

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