Ben has been a student with me on my afternoon class for quite a few months now and has just completed his first shaving horse. This is no lightweight, which is not a problem as it will sit in his garden. To give an idea of scale, the bench part is made from 3 inch thick green oak.
I like to stretch my students and if we can use new joints and various construction techniques then all the better. No metal is used in this shave horse. The table is held onto the bench by oak dowels. The legs are the sliding tapered dovetail joint, one of the best green wood joints of all time. For easy knock down these legs will tap out with a light hammer blow even when wet. Try doing that with a round mortice and tenon joint. The wood is green so this type of joint will still work after warping and drying.
The shave horse has 3 leg the one at the front will act like a wedge in the bench forcing a split down the length of it. To overcome this Ben carved a special joint in the rear table support, so no matter how the leg acts as a wedge the wood will not split.
I will be working, over the winter, on plans and instructions of how to make these shaving horses, pole lathes, benches, saw horses and cleaving breaks. In the autumn I will be setting up a dedicated photographic studio in part of my workshop, so I can get consistent lighting and more importantly a single colour temperature. I have a mixture of tube and tungsten lighting in my workshop which makes colour correction of my photographs a nightmare..
If you want to see another bench made using the sliding tapered dovetail method have a look at this post: http://seanhellman.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/tapered-sliding-dovetail-bench.html
and this one for green wood: http://seanhellman.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/tapered-sliding-dovetail-joint-tree.html
