Homemade Furniture Benches

How you finish a bench includes a huge effect on whether it is considered fine furniture or not. While the paint is a very common finish for colonial coins, a bit of fine furniture will not just painted. Use techniques of stencil along with other finishing techniques such as antiques or painful. A college of fine may require six or seven layers of various finishing techniques to achieve the look.

Benches was once considered a poor man's furniture. However, at the disposal of talented craftspeople, these simple types of seating can become works of art. The real beauty of a bench is it can be built by any builder, with any degree of ability, and still be a great example of craftsmanship. It is just a few knowing what qualities distinguish a tough bench from a piece of fine furniture.

Stability

A sturdy bench is a made with good joinery. While good-quality benches can be created with simple butt joints, benches designed as fine furniture usually employ more elaborate joinery.

Rabbets (squared-off slots made across the edge of a piece of wood) and dados (rectangular grooves produced in the main body of a wood) are frequently used for building boxy structures, for example storage benches. These joints provide extra strength allowing one piece of wood fit into another, there is a more physical bond between your pieces.

Mortise-and-tenon joints are often used to mate legs and spindles, or legs and aprons on benches designed to use them. A tenon is sort of a tongue that's shaped onto the end of the piece, while a mortise is really a slot or hole into that the tenon is fitted. You will find these joints to become extremely strong, as well as quite attractive.

Ornamentation

Although some benches built as fine furniture excel when you are elegantly simple, as with the unadorned lines of the Amish bench, they are more often embellished with decoration. Even an Amish bench could use mortise-and-tenon joints secured by pegs, which function as an ornament of sorts. Furthermore the pegs add strength towards the joints, but they can add extra beauty if produced from contrasting woods.

Some craftsmen add carvings. Use a lathe to add interest to round components for example legs and spindles. You can carve a design right into a flat panel using a knife, or carve away the wood around a design using chisels and gouges, leaving an elevated design. This is called bas-relief carving, and could be very time consuming.

You can get exactly the same effect by gluing moldings onto panels. Creating mosaics--patterns of small, differently-colored bits of wood or other materials that you simply glue onto a panel--is an identical ornamentation technique, and it can be utilized effectively by almost any woodworker with no previous experience.

Polish

How you finish a bench includes a huge effect on whether it is regarded as fine furniture or not. While paint is a very common finish for Colonial pieces, a bit of fine furniture will not simply be painted. Use stenciling techniques and extra finishing techniques such as antiquing or distressing. An excellent bench can require six or seven different layers of finishing techniques to attain its look.

And if you decide to use stain, bear in mind that the kind of wood furniture from which you choose to construct your bench will have as much impact on how the finished piece appears to be the stain itself.