Museum Bench

I was recently contracted by the Boston Children's Museum to do some repair work on the Kyo no Machi-ya, a 125 yr. old Kyōto Merchant's house installed within the museum itself. One of the repair item was a fold up bench, or battari shōgi, which is affixed to the front of the house by the entry. These benches are used by day to display wares by the merchant, and at night they are folded up. At the Children's Museum, the bench is used as a place for people to sit and remove their shoes before entering the house.

The building is open to the public for exploration and receives a lot of traffic, and thus the existing bench, made from Pine, was wearing badly. It was becoming loose in its mountings and a safety hazard. I recommended construction of a new bench with superior hard-wearing materials and detailing. Here's a few photos from that project. The material i chose to work with is Wenge, millettia laurentii, an African hardwood which is black, yet shows lovely grain figure. This wood is extremely dense and tough, and will never need staining or maintenance of it's surface from wear, save for the occasional re-oiling. Here are some of the frame crosspieces, where I have cut tusk tenons:

The tusk tenons fit into their corresponding mortises, which look like this:

The frame rails were connected, (in an improvement over the original which was screwed and plugged), using a twin tenon-stub tenon arrangement with a mitered tongue and groove return on the top:

Here is one of the mortises to receive a twin tenoned rail:

This piece of wood had a small defect which I patched, as you may observe in the above photo. Wenge is a precious material and I must use it judiciously. When the corner joint is drawn together, it looks like this from the top - later the slight projection of end grain will be trimmed flush with the adjacent face, as will the projecting tenons:

Here I am working on one of the hinge pins for the fold out leg assembly - these pins are made from Lignum Vitae, the hardest wood there is, and a wood that is a perfect choice for a hard-wearing part like a hinge pin:

Lignum vitae, in fact, is known to outlast bronze 3 to 1.

Once the hinge pins were complete, they looked like this - I've inserted the Lignum Vitae pins into a Wenge receiving block:

The pin then fits through the leg like this, and you can see that I have also lined the leg socket with Lignum Vitae inserts. It will last virtually forever:

The bench frame itself, also hinged, employed Lignum Vitae hinge pin inserts - here is how the leg and frame will come together:

As in all my work, I hand plane to finish:

Here's a close up of the hinge pin block for the swing out leg assembly after it has been fitted. i use a from of bridle joint for this connection:

I was able to re-use the original floating panels in the replacement bench, which have a lovely texture and patina from 30 years of hard use:

 And here is the installed bench, in the folded-up position - note how well the oiled Wenge matches with the surrounding lacquered wood:

And a final photo of the bench in the down position, as it will be most of the time:

 

Thanks for having a look today! If my design and build services may be of interest to you, please contact me at:

azumadesignbuild@gmail.com

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