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I got my hands on a spruce billet from a friend and after a few whacks at it with a rusty machete (no joke!) was told to go forth and make braces. After a bloodless crash course in Scary Sharp and a $10 investment in a cheap bench plane from Harbor Freight I was happily snicking away in my basement. Being a complete newb at woodworking it's been really interesting to witness how wood reacts to a person's intentions and how a properly sharpened tool makes things deceptively easy. I'm only halfway through but so far here's where I am:



BTW, while there's a lot of videos regarding gluing down braces and chiseling them to their final shape there's only a few videos on splitting billets to make the rough shapes. Chris Paulick's videos were really helpful and provided enough insight for me to want to split the billet over just cutting it up. I'm a little concerned over the waste though (I won't have enough to do my back braces) and one of my X-braces has bowed but I think it can be saved.

It will be interesting to follow the process along, I hope you will post more pix!
DaveB

Good job Neil!

Must say I haven't tried that yet!

I spent a half hour today cutting and planing the remainder of the usable sections of the billet:


I don't know if you can see but the grain on certain parts of the billet were really wavy:


BTW, I still have a lot to learn about gluing! Look at that blotchy job on a sanding surface no less. ;)

I was worried I wouldn't have enough for the upper transverse brace but it worked out. I even got all my finger braces.


... but I fell short for enough usable lengths to brace the back:


Like I said though, the back's still a ways off. Not pictured is the optional X-braced pattern which I was hoping to try but I think fate has told me "not this time." That's OK with me though. I think ladder bracing will do just fine.

Anyway, I still need to tweak these a little. I've been concerned with getting the lengths necessary for each brace while still having a straight grain along their lengths. For the widths I was "eyeballing" them against the plans and basically planing them until they were clean (S4S). I should have had my digital caliper on hand. I was mostly concerned about getting the X braces to 5/16". They're a little light at .3" so we'll see how bad that will be. All the other braces (except for the UTB) re to be 1/4". One finger brace came in at .22".

Oh - and there's that runout thing. Chiseling could either as much fun as I've heard or a bunch of unpleasant surprises. We'll see!

Chiseling is cathartic to me. I'm not a good chiseler, but I get lost in the moment when working braces. If you make a mistake, it's usually easy to fix. Then you forget it and get lost again. A good kind of lost.

nkwak wrote: Like I said though, the back's still a ways off. Not pictured is the optional X-braced pattern which I was hoping to try but I think fate has told me "not this time." That's OK with me though. I think ladder bracing will do just fine.

That might be a good thing. It's easy to get the back too stiff using an X-brace.

OK, I think I'm almost ready for the next step, but I've got to figure out how to straighten out that bowed brace. It was not that way before I started going at it with the bench plane on the sides of the brace wood. I'm guessing that I need to even out the mass so that it straightens itself out. Once that's done it's on to arching the bases of the braces. I have a couple of options for that step but I'm kind of stumped on how to fix this brace.

Slight update: decided to re-do the X braces and obtain more stock for the remaining back braces. This time my friend had a nice straight-grained billet so I decided to just cut them with his bandsaw (which has a fence) and run them through his thickness sander until they were all 5/16" wide. The rest of the braces should be OK to use though.

FWIW, I asked Wayne Henderson if he'd ever had a top fail, and he looked at me sorta sheepishly(if I read him correctly), and said, "you want to stay away from that wavy grain." but this begs the question, how wavy is too wavy. I interpreted this to mean almost any discernible wave. as I've made bracing, I've rejected much of it. maybe one of our experts can weigh in?