Rebuilt Glider Bench

April 24, 2010 by David.

Four years ago we bought a house where the seller left a glider bench literally falling apart with rotted, broken, and missing wooden slats. It was a sorry sight. Now, I love rockers and looked around to see if I could just go out and buy a new glider bench with old fashioned styling and wood slats but couldn’t find anything anywhere near like it so we have dragged it around for literally three thousand miles as we moved. Believe me, people helping us load and unload would give me “that” look when I said we were packing up this bench.

Recently I finally got around to rebuilding it. I decided it was time to put some wood a friend gave me about ten years ago to good use. I believe it is Brazilian Bloodwood. The sun oxidized it to a dark brown, but I knew the wood would be red when cut, and boy was it RED! Orange, in fact. A person at the local  hardware store told me the wood sawdust was used for red in artist paint centuries ago. I cut it into slats on the tablesaw, planed it, and sanded the heck out of it.

Any sawdust gets everywhere, but being red this sawdust let its presence be clearly known. It even turns your hands red when working the wood. Your hands look like you’ve been working with red stain but it washes away relatively easily.

Here’s the how the tablesaw left the floor.

Below on the right is the raw orange-colored wood. The red sticks on the left have had the first coat of Watco Natural Oil applied.

I took the bench apart, sanded, primed, and painted the cast and steel components. Two coats of Watco Natural Oil and three hand rubbed coats of Watco Wax went on the Bloodwood, leaving it a rich, deep red. All held together with chrome cap screws to set it off.

Makes a wonderful addition to the front porch and well worth the roughly 30 hours labor to put it all together!

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