Workbench legs

After having spent too much time away from my shop to tackle some other tasks, it is time to get back to my workbench project. I ended my last wood butchering session with a bunch of legs cut to length.

These legs have been cut from square cedar post, well so I thought...

Not so square...

So after a good workout session using my Bailey #5 I finally got really square legs.

Better now.

I started to work on the front legs. Each of these will have 3 mortises on 3 faces, only the front facing will be plain. I started to mark the post center line and the mortise position.

Top mortise marked.

This is the first time I plan to do all these mortises by hand. For the first section of my workbench, as fool as I was, I used a power router thinking it was quicker. How much ignorant I was! I could not have been more wrong.

First I used my hand brace with a 1/2 auger bit to make a hole at each mortise end.

Hole drilled at each end of the mortise.

Then using the same bit I made holes all along the mortise length, taking great care to put the bit tip right on the center line.

Hole drilled all along.

Finally a short session with a sharp chisel and the waste was removed.

Using a chisel to remove the waste.

The whole process took me less than 10 minutes per mortise. This was almost the same time I needed to only properly set each leg into the jig I used with my power router. Power tools 0 / Hand tools 1!

Brief moment of satisfaction looking at my work. 

Now that my first 3 mortises are done on one leg, I still have 33 of them to make for the 4 front legs I need, some more upcoming pleasure!