Ilker's Blog

I started woodworking last week as an absolute beginner. I did a bench as first project. It was fun.

I didn’t develop any hand skills besides typing on keyboard fast. I wanted to change this for a while. When I was a kid, I made a small table using old woods. I remember it was lots of fun. So I took an action last week and bought some tools to gets hands on.

Things went well. I made a very primitive bench. It is far from perfect but looks cool! I also learnt many things.

Struggle From Start: Buying Wrong Saws

The first step was shopping.

I wanted to buy a handsaw as a first thing. This supposed to be simple shopping but I was exhausted because of the number of options. I didn’t know humanity invented different saw for every single cut type!

I initially bought two hand-saws. They turned out useless for my project. One was rip saw that has big, one-sided blade teeth. It was destroying the wood. I learnt that it was a wrong choice because my cut needs to be “across the grains”. Rip saw is better choice if you cut “parallel to grains”. Lessons learnt.

Then, I bought a crosscut saw which is the right choice for the project. It was working fine but there was a plastic thing on the edge of blade. It prevented saw to go into deep inside the wood. I felt stupid and went shopping again.

Finally, I checked and decided to buy a Japanese saw. Finally the perfect saw for me. If you are beginner, just buy a Japanese saw.

Getting Things Together

I bought the woods and some tools from Bauhaus. I borrowed expensive ones from a friend (e.g., Mikita drill). My overall item list looks like:

• One 100 x 25 x 1,8 cm spruce panel
• Two 200 x 4,4 x 2,4 cm douglas fir wood palette
• Japanese saw to cut the woods
• Mikita drill to make holes for screws. You can go with cheaper options.
• Bosch electrical screw driver to fasten the screws (You don’t need this. You can use Mikita as well, or just hand screw driver is enough)
• Ikea screw set. Any 5-6 cm screw should be enough.
• Bubble level to check everything is leveled until you give up your perfectionism.
• Tailor measure tape to measure things.
• Sanding sponge to get rid of splinters.

Snapshot of my items. I need to get more tidy:

Let’s Start

I cut spruce panel 70 cm length as a top of my bench. I also cut four legs Douglas fir palette where each has 48 cm length. I also made another cut with 60 cm to stabilize the legs and to give the bench more Japanese style.

Because of some calculation mistake or rushing into cutting, the distance between legs was too much so I couldn’t fix the stabilizer wood between them.

I then cut two small pieces of wood and squeezed them in those gaps to stabilize the legs. It was far from perfect and but it did the job. I will glue them later.

Result

I am very happy with the result. It is very primitive but looks cool. I would never sit on it though.