The table had been in the family for 80 some years, but it's days as a table were close to done. Grandma had brought the table with her when she arrived in Canada from the States to take up free land. Three members of the family had been very close to grandma and have many memories sitting at the table. So they had the idea of converting the table into three benches, one for each of them. The wood, not worth saving. The memories, well that's a different story.
Here's the table and leaves as they came in. I sketched a design that would work with the materials, ran it by them, and put together the three benches.
About 44 dowels in each bench, 88 holes per bench. A good exercise in working off square and off flat. Thought I'd try out the veritas dowel jig, my usual dowelling method would have taken too long. The veritas jig is designed for edge joints but I used it to make a template then screwed the template down to the workpiece. Not sure how much time it saved, dowelling is time consuming, but definitely a saving, and it worked out well.
