Mere Mortal Bench pt 2, almost disaster.

So I got the sides together, and rough sanded was very happy with how that turned out so I was ready to add the long stretchers to connect the 2 sides. I had a lot of trouble with this part I tried a few methods of clamping down the stretcher and the side.

This was my first try, it didn’t work very well the screws still pulled the wood so it wasn’t flush.

This didn’t work there.

So I re-watched this part of the mere mortal video to see how Steve did it, and he just layed it on the ground and held everything down. That didn’t work so well either I’m just not strong enough to counter the pull, or I was holding it wrong. I don’t know.

Since I already had 3 of them done, and they where all not flush I decided to just go ahead and get the last one, and I don’t know what happened, but last screw went haywire, and busted out the front of the leg.

Looking at the screw, it went in funny and came out of the pocket joint at a really odd angle. To make matters worse I couldn’t get the screw out. I tried a few different methods of backing the screw out but it wouldn’t budge.

I took a small break to cool my jets so I can approach the problem rationally (I was really mad and ready to throw the whole thing out into the dumpster.

After some thinking, I figured I’d see if I can salvage it before throwing it away, so I glued the large splinter piece back on. Fortunately it looks like it split across the grain, so it glued back on pretty easily.

I also hacksawed off the screw tip, so I could re-attach it to the side. I use the pocket hole jig to create another hole, this time coming in from the bottom, I was able to re screw the side into the original screw holes for all the original screws, then I screwed in the new one on the bottom.

I’m letting it sit while the glue dries but I think it’s recoverable, I need to get the long stretchers to be flush with the sides, I’ll either use my sander or hand plane not sure yet, but you can see here that the screw pulled the board forward more than I’d like.

Always an adventure, we’ll see how it goes the rest of the evening.

-jeremy

-- Easy to use end grain cutting board designer: http://www.1024studios.com/cuttingboard.html