I'm building a garden bench for the family of a 17 year old girl who recently died. I don't know the family, nor the circumstances of the girl's death. A lady who works for the father of the girl contacted me through someone else for whom I had done work. Without much direction I proposed this simple 48" wide bench.
It's very much like a bench I built for myself several years ago except the backrest is different. Some CNC carving will go on both the top and lower backrest pieces. I had a couple of nearly 3" thick slabs of red mulberry, which has very good weather resistance, so I proposed to use that for the project.
If you've never seen red mulberry it's an interesting wood. When freshly cut it's yellow, much like black locust. Over several months it ages to a very nice chestnut brown color. Like black locust the grain is fairly coarse, but it works well with both power and hand tools and surprisingly has little tendency to splinter.
I have most of the parts fabricated now. The legs are 2-1/2" square. I made a template for the legs and used that to route the legs to final size after roughing them out on the bandsaw. I cut all the joinery on my horizontal router mortiser for 1/2" loose tenons cut from scrap stock. I'm working on the arms now.
The drawing shows the arms are made out of 2-1/2" square stock, just like the legs, but I had a board that was almost 4-1/2" wide so I redesigned the arms to look more like what you see on an English garden bench. I like it but it seems a little too beefy for the rest of the bench so I want to lighten it up. I think my two options are to cut a radius in the bottom or top of the arm, similar to the curve in the seat rail.
What would you do?
John
It's very much like a bench I built for myself several years ago except the backrest is different. Some CNC carving will go on both the top and lower backrest pieces. I had a couple of nearly 3" thick slabs of red mulberry, which has very good weather resistance, so I proposed to use that for the project.
If you've never seen red mulberry it's an interesting wood. When freshly cut it's yellow, much like black locust. Over several months it ages to a very nice chestnut brown color. Like black locust the grain is fairly coarse, but it works well with both power and hand tools and surprisingly has little tendency to splinter.
I have most of the parts fabricated now. The legs are 2-1/2" square. I made a template for the legs and used that to route the legs to final size after roughing them out on the bandsaw. I cut all the joinery on my horizontal router mortiser for 1/2" loose tenons cut from scrap stock. I'm working on the arms now.
The drawing shows the arms are made out of 2-1/2" square stock, just like the legs, but I had a board that was almost 4-1/2" wide so I redesigned the arms to look more like what you see on an English garden bench. I like it but it seems a little too beefy for the rest of the bench so I want to lighten it up. I think my two options are to cut a radius in the bottom or top of the arm, similar to the curve in the seat rail.
What would you do?
John
