FORP - Day one

I think we made a lot of progress today.  All of the tops were flattened and thicknesses today.  It helps when you have 20 guys, 2 forklifts and a Oliver stratoplaner that is both a joiner and planer and 36" wide.  Pretty much one pass and the tops are ready.   About half of the group has 2 pieces for their tops, so we got most of those jointed and glued too.  All of the legs have been final dimensioned and are ready to cut tenons.  I'll tell ya, I am jealous of some of these tops.  Several are stunning with lots of figure and ray fleck.  I love mine as well, I think it has lots of character and I am eager to use it!  Some eye candy:

Hand forged ferrule and crank made by Peter Ross.

This pile of slabs...

Gets fed into this monster...

And spits out a flat and nearly finished bench top.

Some come out very pretty.

Others come out ENORMOUS, such as the one for Bo.  16' x 27" x6" thick this beast turned out to be.

What has been really fun so far is that this has been a total team effort.  We all work on all of the benches together.  Here we are processing all of the legs at once.

I was able to test the fit of my screw to the tapped leg too.  Very nice.

As I said, about half the group had to glue up 2 pieces for their slab.  So a good jointed surface was needed for glue up.  Normally this is a fairly easy task.  But when your material requires 3 people to move it, it is a little more tricky and requires good teamwork.

That's all I got for tonight.  Tomorrow we will finish up gluing the slabs we didn't get to today and I am sure there will be some joinery started!