This is a 5 foot wide bench that I made for Luke and his very modern house. For some reason, all of our children want you to take off your shoes when you come into their houses so they all need benches to sit on and take off your shoes. This is the first waterfall bench I made and made it out of a single 15 inch wide 9 foot long board of thermally modified ash and joined the corners to make it a waterfall edge (the grain wraps continuously around the bench).
This project started with my discovery of a magnificent board at Paxton's that was over 17 inches wide and 13 feet long. It was a beauty that I knew I couldn't turn down.
I could not believe my luck in finding a board this wide and long. Of course, the problem is how do you manage a board that big in the shop and cut it down to size. I solved that problem by cutting a straight edge on one side with my track saw and then cutting it to final width on the table saw.
This was not an easy task. Next I needed to make a test waterfall joint so I cut off a little over 3 feet from the board to make the joint. Basically, I layed out the placement of the dominos on the bottom of the boards, cut 45º angles on the top of the board and glued dominos in the tight side of the joint. After sanding the bottom side of the joint, I glue the sides to the top.
I am making a video on how to lay out, cut and join a waterfall joint but here are the results of that test joint. As you can see below, the grain wraps around the joint.
After the successful trial joint, I then cut and joined the 9 foot board to make the 5 foot long 18 inch high bench.
After the glue dried, I removed the clamps and sat on the middle of the bench to find out if it was rigid enough and it wasn't. I then screwed a center rib on the bottom with pocket screws and glued on a second thickness of the material to hide the pocket screws and give the bench greater rigidity. Note, the next three pictures are of a second 4 foot bench I built for our daughter Liz. It has a narrow 1/2" edge.
The unfinished bench then looked like this:
At the time I built this second bench, Paxton's had stop ordering thermally treated ash and only had a few narrow boards left. I glued the narrow boards up to the 15" width.
As was the case with the case with the dining room table, Luke and his wife Minh wanted the entry bench to be black. Also, Liz decided she wanted her bench to be black as well.
Here is Liz's completed bench. See how the narrow edge makes the piece look so much lighter.
Remember that test joint for Luke's bench? Well I could not let it go to waste so I glued up some left over stock from the dining room table and decided to finish it natural since this was why we had selected this ash in the first place. Here is how it turned out
I have some other waterfall edge furniture that I will show in future blogs.
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