Why an Iron is Important!

The explanation why an iron is important for woodworking will be part of this weeks post.

Beside of some progress on the balcony bench project.

But first things first. It is a crazy summer. And I'm not sure any longer, if we can speak about summer.

Since late June the weather is changing every second day. One day it is warm and sunny, the next day it is raining cats and dogs. It drives me mad and summer feeling will not come up.

Really we had not even one warm summer evening or night to have BBQ for example.

The other side of the story is that I can't ventilate my shop. The described conditions will lead into high humidity and I want to keep it out of the shop so that my wood is not doing dirty tricks.

But this means after one hour in the tiny shop it is much too warm inside. That and my day job keeping me busy, prevented again much shop time the last weeks.

Nevertheless I made some progress on the balcony bench.

All the individual parts done and in shape I started the glue up.

The side parts have been pretty straight forward. Some glue, some clamps and going ahead focused. 

Right side part in clamps

Having the side parts glued up I did another dry fit just to see if everything sits proper. And having the bench pretty much together at this point in time, I have made the seat slats.

Seat slats ready and laid out

Now the next stage of glue up was reached. I had to glue all the back slats into the back rails. Thirty mortise and tenon joints. Exciting....and a pain... I have tried to hurry spreading the glue onto the joints and to bring the parts together. The lower rail worked well, but during the setup of the top rail it happened. Glue freeze - damn. There was no movement any longer. I immediately remembered Mr Sellers advise to use the hammer and some couraged  blows. That finally worked. I added some clamps quickly and squeezed the whole thing together.

Back rails and slats in the clamps

The clamps removed, the backrest came out like this. Finally not bad at all. Having this difficulties I only have got two small gaps between a slat shoulder and the top rail. That will never been seen again. I spread some glue into it so that no water is able to enter.

Backrest glued up

Now coming to the story why an iron is important for woodworkers. During my really couraged hammer blows shit happened. I slipped off and damaged the edge of the top rail heavily.

Damage

It was too deep to plane or scrap it out. And once again Mr Sellers came to help. I remembered a video of him where he showed how to iron out dings and dents. So I dug out my old workshop iron and a rag. 

Iron and rag

I made the rag wet, heated the iron and started to iron the edge of the back rail.

Ironing the dent

The rag was made wet a few times and I ironed a while. After a while of doing so it came out like this....

Iron repair

The situation was much better than before. Now I was able to work this defect out with a scraper and some sandpaper. Phew!

Last stage was to glue up side parts and the rail assembly. Challenge here have been the clamps. I don't have such long clamps. So I set up some pipe clamps. Although I don't like them pretty much. But they have done the job good enough.

Gluing all together

 Drum roll now....here it is............

All together

Having all parts together I have laid out the seat slats once again. And it's looking nice as I find.

Finally some screws to fix the seat slats and I'm kinda done. Apart from finishing. 

I think I will call the project done from a blog point of view. Of course I will share some pictures when it is finished. It took two month longer than expected. Not because of the complexity, but because so many thing came into my way this summer.

Having this thing out of the shop will bring the needed space for doing some new, but smaller projects.

Stay tuned!
Stefan