This trestle bench was a piece I built at a local college woodworking course. The course was four full days so I took the time off work and spent the entire week working on this bench.  The basic form of the bench follows the instructor’s plan, we had the option of going with a wedged mortise or a wedged through dovetail, I chose the wedged dovetail.

After the four days was up, I still hadn’t decided on the final shaping. So I brought it home, created a sketchup model of it and spent some time playing with design options. I finally decided on what you see here, slight taper to the seat ends, quarter circle cut outs on the seats and the gables, I also added the 3/16” bead detail to the trestle. Finally I decided to angle the trestle ends as well as rounding over the edges of it and the wedges.

The bench is made of 8/4 Big Leaf Maple with Jatoba for the wedges, seat anchors and the four “pins” used to keep the seat slats aligned. For finishing this piece I planed or scraped all the flat surfaces and went straight to 220 grit for the final sanding. Finished with three coats of danish oil and two coats of water based poly. The bench is four feet long and about 16 inches tall.

thanks for looking…Devin.

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