Drawboring and Bolting

Working on a large workbench in inconsistent 2 hour periods at night is a sure-fire way to make slow progress on big projects.  In the last post I got the base together.  It’s now drawbored and bolted.  Here some glamour shots of the drawboring and the bed-bolt arrangement I went with

One thing that I failed to realize is that I should have made the oak pegs oversize for the 3/8 hole I drilled.  The pegs tend to twist and bend as they are driven home and open up little spaces at the edges of the holes.  I followed the PW guide on drawboring here, but neglected the pin shaping suggestions (other than adding a taper).  They look OK.  The end units are crazy solid.

I then drilled the counterbores for the washers with a forstner (same one I used for the mortises) and used the center point of the counterbore as a starting point to sink a 1/2 hole as far into the stretcher as I could.  I then disassembled the frame and drilled the stretcher as deep as I could with my existing bit.  If I had access to a drill press, I would have drilled the leg holes with the press to make sure that they were vertical and then used those holes to freehand the stretchers.  As it was, all the holes were a little angled, but it didn’t seem to matter.

Once these were drilled, I used the forstner to drill the crossbores and used a chisel to square up the resulting hole.  Everything pulled together at that point and is super solid.  The bolts were 8 inch long 3/8 bolts from the home center.  Next up, gluing up the tops and flattening them.