Hand made, curved oak benches
Using traditional technics, I turned a heap of bone oak (oak that’s died and seasoned on tree) and several green oak butts into a pair of bespoke garden benches to sit around a Kadai fire bowl. The timber, as always, was sourced locally and fashioned by hand with a maul, wedges, a side axe and drawknives.
To create the curve, I steamed the oak rails in a specially constructed steam box made from MBP and bent them around bespoke steel jigs I had made up by davetheblacksmith in Derbyshire.
Now the 42 pieces of oak were ready to take to my workshop for assembling. The leg frames were relatively straight forward to build, however to connect the leg frames together was a whole other story.
For this I had to built a jig that would hold the rails in position to mark where each of the 40 mortices should be, this was a lengthy process aligning each rail to flow into another and create the desired overall shape and character of each bench.