A wagon bench

Another Christmas project was taken on when a friend brought over a bunch of 25-year-old ‘not so’ hardwood and asked if I could build a wagon bench for him. He had his grandfather’s hardware from his wagon seat and wanted to make a bench with it. At first, I thought it would be easy, but the wood was so old and brittle that it became quite the project. All the hardware was taken from his (my friends) grandfather’s wagon seat, which we used as a pattern. Each piece of the hardware was a different length, angle… from the others so it was a bit of a trick getting it to all work together.

The wood actually was very hard, some type of Australian hardwood. I went through a couple of sets of planer knives trying to get some usable boards. It was a very pretty wood when it was cleaned up but the problem was that it was so old that it would shatter when one tried to work with it. In the end, however, we finally got it finished and it turned out better than either of us had hoped!