My beautiful and talented wife is a weaver and she has recently acquired a thirty six inch eight shaft floor loom. I volunteered to make a weaving bench based on a traditional design to go with it. The bench is adjustable in height both for ergonomics and for adjustments for different setup tasks on the loom as well as the weaving process. It has a removable seat top that allows for a storage area inside the seat.
The traditional design that I had seen had very simple butt joints secured with screws. I decided to do mine in maple 1 1/16” x 11 1/4” for the uprights and the stretcher and 3/4” x 7 1/4” for the seat box and top. The stretcher has penetrating tenons connecting to the uprights with a slight bevel on the exposed tenon ends. The seat box has 3/8” box joints and 1/4” plywood bottom and a 3/4” maple removable top with battens on the bottom to align it in the opening of the box so it doesn’t slide around.
I built a new box joint jig for my table saw which worked very well for cutting the joints. The groove for the bottom panel went through one of the box joint fingers on each corner. At assembly time I plugged those holes with a contrasting walnut plug to give a little decorative detail on both sides of the box.
I was able to screw the two end pieces together after marking up all the features and do all the holes, mortises, and curved band saw cuts with them aligned and secure. I rounded over all the edges on both sides of each upright and the stretchers.
After sanding everything to 320 grit I assembled and glued up all the joints. After some post glue up sanding I put on three coats of wipe on polyurethane finish. I am very happy with the finish and my wife is enjoying the bench.